Podcast appearances and mentions of tim at

About TimTim Gonda is a Cloud Security professional who has spent the last eight years securing and building Cloud workloads for commercial, non-profit, government, and national defense organizations. Tim currently serves as the Technical Director of Cloud at Praetorian, influencing the direction of its offensive-security-focused Cloud Security practice and the Cloud features of Praetorian's flagship product, Chariot. He considers himself lucky to have the privilege of working with the talented cyber operators at Praetorian and considers it the highlight of his career.Tim is highly passionate about helping organizations fix Cloud Security problems, as they are found, the first time, and most importantly, the People/Process/Technology challenges that cause them in the first place. In his spare time, he embarks on adventures with his wife and ensures that their two feline bundles of joy have the best playtime and dining experiences possible.Links Referenced: Praetorian: https://www.praetorian.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timgondajr/ Praetorian Blog: https://www.praetorian.com/blog/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they've been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching 'em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With 0 admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents. Check out what people are saying at canary.love today!Corey: Kentik provides Cloud and NetOps teams with complete visibility into hybrid and multi-cloud networks. Ensure an amazing customer experience, reduce cloud and network costs, and optimize performance at scale — from internet to data center to container to cloud. Learn how you can get control of complex cloud networks at www.kentik.com, and see why companies like Zoom, Twitch, New Relic, Box, Ebay, Viasat, GoDaddy, booking.com, and many, many more choose Kentik as their network observability platform. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, I like to branch out into new and exciting territory that I've never visited before. But today, no, I'd much rather go back to complaining about cloud security, something that I tend to do an awful lot about. Here to do it with me is Tim Gonda, Technical Director of Cloud at Praetorian. Tim, thank you for joining me on this sojourn down what feels like an increasingly well-worn path.Tim: Thank you, Corey, for having me today.Corey: So, you are the Technical Director of Cloud, which I'm sort of short-handing to okay, everything that happens on the computer is henceforth going to be your fault. How accurate is that in the grand scheme of things?Tim: It's not too far off. But we like to call it Praetorian for nebula. The nebula meaning that it's Schrödinger's problem: it both is and is not the problem. Here's why. We have a couple key focuses at Praetorian, some of them focusing on more traditional pen testing, where we're looking at hardware, hit System A, hit System B, branch out, get to goal.On the other side, we have hitting web applications and [unintelligible 00:01:40]. This insecure app leads to this XYZ vulnerability, or this medical appliance is insecure and therefore we're able to do XYZ item. One of the things that frequently comes up is that more and more organizations are no longer putting their applications or infrastructure on-prem anymore, so therefore, some part of the assessment ends up being in the cloud. And that is the unique rub that I'm in. And that I'm responsible for leading the direction of the cloud security focus group, who may not dive into a specific specialty that some of these other teams might dig into, but may have similar responsibilities or similar engagement style.And in this case, if we discover something in the cloud as an issue, or even in your own organization where you have a cloud security team, you'll have a web application security team, you'll have your core information security team that defends your environment in many different methods, many different means, you'll frequently find that the cloud security team is the hot button for hey, the server was misconfigured at one certain level, however the cloud security team didn't quite know that this web application was vulnerable. We did know that it was exposed to the internet but we can't necessarily turn off all web applications from the internet because that would no longer serve the purpose of a web application. And we also may not know that a particular underlying host's patch is out of date. Because technically, that would be siloed off into another problem.So, what ends up happening is that on almost every single incident that involves a cloud infrastructure item, you might find that cloud security will be right there alongside the incident responders. And yep, this [unintelligible 00:03:20] is here, it's exposed to the internet via here, and it might have the following application on it. And they get cross-exposure with other teams that say, “Hey, your web application is vulnerable. We didn't quite inform the cloud security team about it, otherwise this wouldn't be allowed to go to the public internet,” or on the infrastructure side, “Yeah, we didn't know that there was a patch underneath it, we figured that we would let the team handle it at a later date, and therefore this is also vulnerable.” And what ends up happening sometimes, is that the cloud security team might be the onus or might be the hot button in the room of saying, “Hey, it's broken. This is now your problem. Please fix it with changing cloud configurations or directing a team to make this change on our behalf.”So, in essence, sometimes cloud becomes—it both is and is not your problem when a system is either vulnerable or exposed or at some point, worst case scenario, ends up being breached and you're performing incident response. That's one of the cases why it's important to know—or important to involve others in the cloud security problem, or to be very specific about what the role of a cloud security team is, or where cloud security has to have certain boundaries or has to involve certain extra parties have to be involved in the process. Or when it does its own threat modeling process, say that, okay, we have to take a look at certain cloud findings or findings that's within our security realm and say that these misconfigurations or these items, we have to treat the underlying components as if they are vulnerable, whether or not they are and we have to report on them as if they are vulnerable, even if it means that a certain component of the infrastructure has to already be assumed to either have a vulnerability, have some sort of misconfiguration that allows an outside attacker to execute attacks against whatever the [unintelligible 00:05:06] is. And we have to treat and respond our security posture accordingly.Corey: One of the problems that I keep running into, and I swear it's not intentional, but people would be forgiven for understanding or believing otherwise, is that I will periodically inadvertently point out security problems via Twitter. And that was never my intention because, “Huh, that's funny, this thing isn't working the way that I would expect that it would,” or, “I'm seeing something weird in the logs in my test account. What is that?” And, “Oh, you found a security vulnerability or something akin to one in our environment. Oops. Next time, just reach out to us directly at the security contact form.” That's great. If I'd known I was stumbling blindly into a security approach, but it feels like the discovery of these things is not heralded by an, “Aha, I found it.” But, “Huh, that's funny.”Tim: Of course. Absolutely. And that's where some of the best vulnerabilities come where you accidentally stumble on something that says, “Wait, does this work how—what I think it is?” Click click. Like, “Oh, boy, it does.”Now, I will admit that certain cloud providers are really great about with proactive security reach outs. If you either just file a ticket or file some other form of notification, just even flag your account rep and say, “Hey, when I was working on this particular cloud environment, the following occurred. Does this work the way I think it is? Is this is a problem?” And they usually get back to you with reporting it to their internal team, so on and so forth. But let's say applications are open-source frameworks or even just organizations at large where you might have stumbled upon something, the best thing to do was either look up, do they have a public bug bounty program, do they have a security contact or form reach out that you can email them, or do you know, someone that the organization that you just send a quick email saying, “Hey, I found this.”And through some combination of those is usually the best way to go. And to be able to provide context of the organization being, “Hey, the following exists.” And the most important things to consider when you're sending this sort of information is that they get these sorts of emails almost daily.Corey: One of my favorite genre of tweet is when Tavis Ormandy and Google's Project Zero winds up doing a tweet like, “Hey, do I know anyone over at the security apparatus at insert company here?” It's like, “All right. I'm sure people are shorting stocks now [laugh], based upon whatever he winds up doing that.”Tim: Of course.Corey: It's kind of fun to watch. But there's no cohesive way of getting in touch with companies on these things because as soon as you'd have something like that, it feels like it's subject to abuse, where Comcast hasn't fixed my internet for three days, now I'm going to email their security contact, instead of going through the normal preferred process of wait in the customer queue so they can ignore you.Tim: Of course. And that's something else you want to consider. If you broadcast that a security vulnerability exists without letting the entity or company know, you're also almost causing a green light, where other security researchers are going to go dive in on this and see, like, one, does this work how you described. But that actually is a positive thing at some point, where either you're unable to get the company's attention, or maybe it's an open-source organization, or maybe you're not being fully sure that something is the case. However, when you do submit something to the customer and you want it to take it seriously, here's a couple of key things that you should consider.One, provide evidence that whatever you're talking about has actually occurred, two, provide repeatable steps that the layman's term, even IT support person can attempt to follow in your process, that they can repeat the same vulnerability or repeat the same security condition, and three, most importantly, detail why this matters. Is this something where I can adjust a user's password? Is this something where I can extract data? Is this something where I'm able to extract content from your website I otherwise shouldn't be able to? And that's important for the following reason.You need to inform the business what is the financial value of why leaving this unpatched becomes an issue for them. And if you do that, that's how those security vulnerabilities get prioritized. It's not necessarily because the coolest vulnerability exists, it's because it costs the company money, and therefore the security team is going to immediately jump on it and try to contain it before it costs them any more.Corey: One of my least favorite genres of security report are the ones that I get where I found a vulnerability. It's like, that's interesting. I wasn't aware that I read any public-facing services, but all right, I'm game; what have you got? And it's usually something along the lines of, “You haven't enabled SPF to hard fail an email that doesn't wind up originating explicitly from this list of IP addresses. Bug bounty, please.” And it's, “No genius. That is very much an intentional choice. Thank you for playing.”It comes down to also an idea of whenever I have reported security vulnerabilities in the past, the pattern I always take is, “I'm seeing something that I don't fully understand. I suspect this might have security implications, but I'm also more than willing to be proven wrong.” Because showing up with, “You folks are idiots and have a security problem,” is a terrific invitation to be proven wrong and look like an idiot. Because the first time you get that wrong, no one will take you seriously again.Tim: Of course. And as you'll find that most bug bounty programs are, if you participate in those, the first couple that you might have submitted, the customer might even tell you, “Yeah, we're aware that that vulnerability exists, however, we don't view it as a core issue and it cannot affect the functionality of our site in any meaningful way, therefore we're electing to ignore it.” Fair.Corey: Very fair. But then when people write up about those things, well, they've they decided this is not an issue, so I'm going to do a write-up on it. Like, “You can't do that. The NDA doesn't let you expose that.” “Really? Because you just said it's a non-issue. Which is it?”Tim: And the key to that, I guess, would also be that is there an underlying technology that doesn't necessarily have to be attributed to said organization? Can you also say that, if I provide a write-up or if I put up my own personal blog post—let's say, we go back to some of the OpenSSL vulnerabilities including OpenSSL 3.0, that came out not too long ago, but since that's an open-source project, it's fair game—let's just say that if there was a technology such as that, or maybe there's a wrapper around it that another organization could be using or could be implementing a certain way, you don't necessarily have to call the company up by name, or rather just say, here's the core technology reason, and here's the core technology risk, and here's the way I've demoed exploiting this. And if you publish an open-source blog like that and then you tweet about that, you can actually gain security support around such issue and then fight for the research.An example would be that I know a couple of pen testers who have reported things in the past, and while the first time they reported it, the company was like, “Yeah, we'll fix it eventually.” But later, when another researcher report this exact same finding, the company is like, “We should probably take this seriously and jump on it.” It sometimes it's just getting in front of that and providing frequency or providing enough people around to say that, “Hey, this really is an issue in the security community and we should probably fix this item,” and keep pushing others organizations on it. A lot of times, they just need additional feedback. Because as you said, somebody runs an automated scanner against your email and says that, “Oh, you're not checking SPF as strictly as the scanner would have liked because it's a benchmarking tool.” It's not necessarily a security vulnerability rather than it's just how you've chosen to configure something and if it works for you, it works for you.Corey: How does cloud change this? Because a lot of what we talked about so far could apply to anything. Go back in time to 1995 and a lot of what we're talking about mostly holds true. It feels like cloud acts as a significant level of complexity on top of all of this. How do you view the differentiation there?Tim: So, I think it differentiated two things. One, certain services or certain vulnerability classes that are handled by the shared service model—for the most part—are probably secure better than you might be able to do yourself. Just because there's a lot of research, the team is [experimented 00:13:03] a lot of time on this. An example of if there's a particular, like, spoofing or network interception vulnerability that you might see on a local LAN network, you probably are not going to have the same level access to be able to execute that on a virtual private cloud or VNet, or some other virtual network within cloud environment. Now, something that does change with the paradigm of cloud is the fact that if you accidentally publicly expose something or something that you've created expo—or don't set a setting to be private or only specific to your resources, there is a couple of things that could happen. The vulnerabilities exploitability based on where increases to something that used to be just, “Hey, I left a port open on my own network. Somebody from HR or somebody from it could possibly interact with it.”However, in the cloud, you've now set this up to the entire world with people that might have resources or motivations to go after this product, and using services like Shodan—which are continually mapping the internet for open resources—and they can quickly grab that, say, “Okay, I'm going to attack these targets today,” might continue to poke a little bit further, maybe an internal person that might be bored at work or a pen tester just on one specific engagement. Especially in the case of let's say, what you're working on has sparked the interest of a nation-state and they want to dig into a little bit further, they have the resources to be able to dedicate time, people, and maybe tools and tactics against whatever this vulnerability that you've given previously the example of—maybe there's a specific ID and a URL that just needs to be guessed right to give them access to something—they might spend the time trying to brute force that URL, brute force that value, and eventually try to go after what you have.The main paradigm shift here is that there are certain things that we might consider less of a priority because the cloud has already taken care of them with the shared service model, and rightfully so, and there's other times that we have to take heightened awareness on is, one, we either dispose something to the entire internet or all cloud accounts within creations. And that's actually something that we see commonly. In fact, one thing I would like to say we see very common is, all AWS users, regardless if it's in your account or somewhere else, might have access to your SNS topic or SQS Queue. Which doesn't seem like that big of vulnerability, but I changed the messages, I delete messages, I viewed your messages, but rather what's connected to those? Let's talk database Lambda functions where I've got source code that a developer has written to handle that source code and may not have built in logic to handle—maybe there was a piece of code that could be abused as part of this message that might allow an attacker to send something to your Lambda function and then execute something on that attacker's behalf.You weren't aware of it, you weren't thinking about it, and now you've exposed it to almost the entire internet. And since anyone can go sign up for an AWS account—or Azure or GCP account—and then they're able to start poking at that same piece of code that you might have developed thinking, “Well, this is just for internal use. It's not a big deal. That one static code analysis tool isn't probably too relevant.” Now, it becomes hyper-relevant and something you have to consider with a little more attention and dedicated time to making sure that these things that you've written or deploying, are in fact, safe because misconfigured or mis-exposed, and suddenly the entire world is starts knocking at it, and increases the risk of, it may really well be a problem. The severity of that issue could increase dramatically.Corey: As you take a look across, let's call it the hyperscale clouds, the big three—which presumably I don't need to define out—how do you wind up ranking them in terms of security from top to bottom? I have my own rankings that I like to dole out and basically, this is the, let's offend someone at every one of these companies, no matter how we wind up playing it. Because I will argue with you just on principle on them. How do you view them stacking up against each other?Tim: So, an interesting view on that is based on who's been around longest and who is encountered of the most technical debt. A lot of these security vulnerabilities or security concerns may have had to deal with a decision made long ago that might have made sense at the time and now the company has kind of stuck with that particular technology or decision or framework, and are now having to build or apply security Band-Aids to that process until it gets resolved. I would say, ironically, AWS is actually at the top of having that technical debt, and actually has so many different types of access policies that are very complex to configure and not very user intuitive unless you speak intuitively JSON or YAML or some other markdown language, to be able to tell you whether or not something was actually set up correctly. Now, there are a lot of security experts who make their money based on knowing how to configure or be able to assess whether or not these are actually the issue. I would actually bring them as, by default, by design, between the big three, they're actually on the lower end of certain—based on complexity and easy-to-configure-wise.The next one that would also go into that pile, I would say is probably Microsoft Azure, who [sigh] admittedly, decided to say that, “Okay, let's take something that was very complicated and everyone really loved to use as an identity provider, Active Directory, and try to use that as a model for.” Even though they made it extensively different. It is not the same as on-prem directory, but use that as the framework for how people wanted to configure their identity provider for a new cloud provider. The one that actually I would say, comes out on top, just based on use and based on complexity might be Google Cloud. They came to a lot of these security features first.They're acquiring new companies on a regular basis with the acquisition of Mandiant, the creation of their own security tooling, their own unique security approaches. In fact, they probably wrote the book on Kubernetes Security. Would be on top, I guess, from usability, such as saying that I don't want to have to manage all these different types of policies. Here are some buttons I would like to flip and I'd like my resources, for the most part by default, to be configured correctly. And Google does a pretty good job of that.Also, one of the things they do really well is entity-based role assumption, which inside of AWS, you can provide access keys by default or I have to provide a role ID after—or in Azure, I'm going to say, “Here's a [unintelligible 00:19:34] policy for something specific that I want to grant access to a specific resource.” Google does a pretty good job of saying that okay, everything is treated as an email address. This email address can be associated in a couple of different ways. It can be given the following permissions, it can have access to the following things, but for example, if I want to remove access to something, I just take that email address off of whatever access policy I had somewhere, and then it's taken care of. But they do have some other items such as their design of least privilege is something to be expected when you consider their hierarchy.I'm not going to say that they're not without fault in that area—in case—until they had something more recently, as far as finding certain key pieces of, like say, tags or something within a specific sub-project or in our hierarchy, there were cases where you might have granted access at a higher level and that same level of access came all the way down. And where at least privilege is required to be enforced, otherwise, you break their security model. So, I like them for how simple it is to set up security at times, however, they've also made it unnecessarily complex at other times so they don't have the flexibility that the other cloud service providers have. On the flip side of that, the level of flexibility also leads to complexity at times, which I also view as a problem where customers think they've done something correctly based on their best knowledge, the best of documentation, the best and Medium articles they've been researching, and what they have done is they've inadvertently made assumptions that led to core anti-patterns, like, [unintelligible 00:21:06] what they've deployed.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Uptycs, because they believe that many of you are looking to bolster your security posture with CNAPP and XDR solutions. They offer both cloud and endpoint security in a single UI and data model. Listeners can get Uptycs for up to 1,000 assets through the end of 2023 (that is next year) for $1. But this offer is only available for a limited time on UptycsSecretMenu.com. That's U-P-T-Y-C-S Secret Menu dot com.Corey: I think you're onto something here, specifically in—well, when I've been asked historically and personally to rank security, I have viewed Google Cloud as number one, and AWS is number two. And my reasoning behind that has been from an absolute security of their platform and a pure, let's call it math perspective, it really comes down to which of the two of them had what for breakfast on any given day there, they're so close on there. But in a project that I spin up in Google Cloud, everything inside of it can talk to each other by default and I can scope that down relatively easily, whereas over an AWS land, by default, nothing can talk to anything. And that means that every permission needs to be explicitly granted, which in an absolutist sense and in a vacuum, yeah, that makes sense, but here in reality, people don't do that. We've seen a number of AWS blog posts over the last 15 years—they don't do this anymore—but it started off with, “Oh, yeah, we're just going to grant [* on * 00:22:04] for the purposes of this demo.”“Well, that's horrible. Why would you do that?” “Well, if we wanted to specify the IAM policy, it would take up the first third of the blog post.” How about that? Because customers go through that exact same thing. I'm trying to build something and ship.I mean, the biggest lie in any environment or any codebase ever, is the comment that starts with, “To do.” Yeah, that is load-bearing. You will retire with that to do still exactly where it is. You have to make doing things the right way at least the least frictionful path because no one is ever going to come back and fix this after the fact. It's never going to happen, as much as we wish that it did.Tim: At least until after the week of the breach when it was highlighted by the security team to say that, “Hey, this was the core issue.” Then it will be fixed in short order. Usually. Or a Band-Aid is applied to say that this can no longer be exploited in this specific way again.Corey: My personal favorite thing that, like, I wouldn't say it's a lie. But the favorite thing that I see in all of these announcements right after the, “Your security is very important to us,” right after it very clearly has not been sufficiently important to them, and they say, “We show no signs of this data being accessed.” Well, that can mean a couple different things. It can mean, “We have looked through the audit logs for a service going back to its launch and have verified that nothing has ever done this except the security researcher who found it.” Great. Or it can mean, “What even are logs, exactly? We're just going to close our eyes and assume things are great.” No, no.Tim: So, one thing to consider there is in that communication, that entire communication has probably been vetted by the legal department to make sure that the company is not opening itself up for liability. I can say from personal experience, when that usually has occurred, unless it can be proven that breach was attributable to your user specifically, the default response is, “We have determined that the security response of XYZ item or XYZ organization has determined that your data was not at risk at any point during this incident.” Which might be true—and we're quoting Star Wars on this one—from a certain point of view. And unfortunately, in the case of a post-breach, their security, at least from a regulation standpoint where they might be facing a really large fine, is absolutely probably their top priority at this very moment, but has not come to surface because, for most organizations, until this becomes something that is a financial reason to where they have to act, where their reputation is on the line, they're not necessarily incentivized to fix it. They're incentivized to push more products, push more features, keep the clients happy.And a lot of the time going back and saying, “Hey, we have this piece of technical debt,” it doesn't really excite our user base or doesn't really help us gain a competitive edge in the market is considered an afterthought until the crisis occurs and the information security team rejoices because this is the time they actually get to see their stuff fixed, even though it might be a super painful time for them in the short run because they get to see these things fixed, they get to see it put to bed. And if there's ever a happy medium, where, hey, maybe there was a legacy feature that wasn't being very well taken care of, or maybe this feature was also causing the security team a lot of pain, we get to see both that feature, that item, that service, get better, as well as security teams not have to be woken up on a regular basis because XYZ incident happened, XYZ item keeps coming up in a vulnerability scan. If it finally is put to bed, we consider that a win for all. And one thing to consider in security as well as kind of, like, we talk about the relationship between the developers and security and/or product managers and security is if we can make it a win, win, win situation for all, that's the happy path that we really want to be getting to. If there's a way that we can make sure that experience is better for customers, the security team doesn't have to be broken up on a regular basis because an incident happened, and the developers receive less friction when they want to go implement something, you find that that secure feature, function, whatever tends to be the happy path forward and the path of least resistance for everyone around it. And those are sometimes the happiest stories that can come out of some of these incidents.Corey: It's weird to think of there being any happy stories coming out of these things, but it's definitely one of those areas that there are learnings there to be had if we're willing to examine them. The biggest problem I see so often is that so many companies just try and hide these things. They give the minimum possible amount of information so the rest of us can't learn by it. Honestly, some of the moments where I've gained the most respect for the technical prowess of some of these cloud providers has been after there's been a security issue and they have disclosed either their response or why it was a non-issue because they took a defense-in-depth approach. It's really one of those transformative moments that I think is an opportunity if companies are bold enough to chase them down.Tim: Absolutely. And in a similar vein, when we think of certain cloud providers outages and we're exposed, like, the major core flaw of their design, and if it kept happening—and again, these outages could be similar and analogous to an incident or a security flaw, meaning that it affected us. It was something that actually happened. In the case of let's say, the S3 outage of, I don't know, it was like 2017, 2018, where it turns out that there was a core DNS system that inside of us-east-1, which is actually very close to where I live, apparently was the core crux of, for whatever reason, the system malfunctioned and caused a major outage. Outside of that, in this specific example, they had to look at ways of how do we not have a single point of failure, even if it is a very robust system, to make sure this doesn't happen again.And there was a lot of learnings to be had, a lot of in-depth investigation that happened, probably a lot of development, a lot of research, and sometimes on the outside of an incident, you really get to understand why a system was built a certain way or why a condition exists in the first place. And it sometimes can be fascinating to kind of dig into that very deeper and really understand what the core problem is. And now that we know what's an issue, we can actually really work to address it. And sometimes that's actually one of the best parts about working at Praetorian in some cases is that a lot of the items we find, we get to find them early before it becomes one of these issues, but the most important thing is we get to learn so much about, like, why a particular issue is such a big problem. And you have to really solve the core business problem, or maybe even help inform, “Hey, this is an issue for it like this.”However, this isn't necessarily all bad in that if you make these adjustments of these items, you get to retain this really cool feature, this really cool thing that you built, but also, you have to say like, here's some extra, added benefits to the customers that you weren't really there. And—such as the old adage of, “It's not a bug, it's a feature,” sometimes it's exactly what you pointed out. It's not necessarily all bad in an incident. It's also a learning experience.Corey: Ideally, we can all learn from these things. I want to thank you for being so generous with your time and talking about how you view this increasingly complicated emerging space. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Tim: You can find me on LinkedIn which will be included in this podcast description. You can also go look at articles that the team is putting together at praetorian.com. Unfortunately, I'm not very big on Twitter.Corey: Oh, well, you must be so happy. My God, what a better decision you're making than the rest of us.Tim: Well, I like to, like, run a little bit under the radar, except on opportunities like this where I can talk about something I'm truly passionate about. But I try not to pollute the airwaves too much, but LinkedIn is a great place to find me. Praetorian blog for stuff the team is building. And if anyone wants to reach out, feel free to hit the contact page up in praetorian.com. That's one of the best places to get my attention.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:30:19]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Tim Gonda, Technical Director of Cloud at Praetorian. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment talking about how no one disagrees with you based upon a careful examination of your logs.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. 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Mike Isaacson: Now when you say recommended dose… [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOsLizards wearing human clothesHinduism's secret codesThese are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genesWarfare keeps the nation cleanWhiteness is an AIDS vaccineThese are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocideMuslim's rampant femicideShooting suspects named Sam HydeHiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the copsSecret service, special opsThey protect us, not sweatshopsThese are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of the Nazi Lies Podcast. Subscribe to our Patreon to get access to early episodes and membership in our book club and Discord. Today we are joined by Dr. Tim Geary, a pharmacoparasitologist or parasitopharmacologist… He studies parasites and makes drugs. He's a professor emeritus at McGill University and still teaches courses at Queen's University Belfast. He's here to talk to us about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and why they probably won't neutralize Coronavirus. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Geary. Tim Geary: You're welcome, Mike. Please call me Tim. Mike: Okay, Tim. Before we get into all the science, tell our audience a little bit about what you've done professionally, because you have a very extensive list of bona fides, and I don't really know where to start. [laughs] Tim: That's quite all right. Yes, I have been working on the study of drugs, pharmacology, for about 45 years, and most of that time I've been working on chemotherapy of infectious diseases, primarily parasites. This includes work in Africa. Most of my career has been on veterinary parasites or human neglected tropical diseases caused by parasites. During the course of my career I have worked on malaria, and that's where chloroquine and its derivative hydroxychloroquine come from, and also ivermectin, which I have studied for many, many years, both in animals and people. In full disclosure, Mike, I once did work for the pharmaceutical industry, the animal health arm of a company called up Upjohn that is now known as Zoetis in Kalamazoo, Michigan. [ed. It's now part of Viatris.] I also consulted and worked with the World Health Organization, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and with the Carter Center on various problems of tropical diseases, and I continue to be a consultant for some animal health companies. That's who I am. Mike: Very good. All right. Now you've done some research on both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, correct? Tim: I have, indeed. I worked on both how they work to kill parasites and also how parasites become resistant to them. I have studied them in clinical settings as well as in the laboratory, and I think I qualify as an expert in both medicines in the indications for which they are used, which is essentially tropical medicine and veterinary parasitology. Mike: Very good. And you've also been following the misinformation surrounding these two drugs too, right? Tim: I have, with great interest and concern. There aren't very many people in the world who are experts at drug discovery and drug development for these kinds of conditions. That's unfortunate. But yes, I have followed that, Mike, and I certainly have opinions about where the misinformation came from. It was not a malintention, it was just wrong interpretation and wrong design of some initial experiments that led to inappropriate conclusions in a rush to clinical use. Mike: Okay, so let's talk about each of these medications and then we'll talk about where the rumors started. So let's start with hydroxychloroquine. Since the beginning of the pandemic almost, it was heralded as a miracle COVID cure but was quickly discovered not to be that. What were its recognised clinical uses? Tim: So hydroxychloroquine is a derivative of a drug called chloroquine, which was also touted initially as a possible solution to COVID. Chloroquine was a miracle drug for the treatment of malaria. It saved, oh my gosh, millions and millions of lives over the course of its use. It's relatively cheap, it's reasonably safe and it was highly effective against malaria parasites until they evolved resistance to it. It's use for malaria has now diminished remarkably. Hydroxychloroquine was thought to be a safer alternative with a better sort of safety profile. But it never was really used for malaria. It just never displaced chloroquine. Instead, it found use as kind of an immunomodulator compound for people with systemic lupus erythematosus or lupus as it's commonly known, an autoimmune condition. So hydroxychloroquine for people with lupus does help to reduce symptoms, to reduce worsening of the disease, and it is a valuable drug for that purpose. Mike: Okay, and how safe is it to experiment with? Tim: Not very. I mean, it does have side effects, especially when you go over recommended dosing. We'll talk, I think Mike, in a little bit about how that relates to potential uses against COVID, if you like, but it's normal use in lupus patients, it's pretty well tolerated. But the doses are quite specific for that, and as with most medicines, it's safe when used appropriately. Mike: And what happens when it's not used appropriately? What kinds of symptoms can you... Tim: There are a variety; hearing loss is one that kind of stands out, but you can get imbalances, a sort of dizziness, classic nausea, vomiting, things like that. It's not a drug to be taken lightly. It's not as safe as many of the medicines that we use. But again, when it's used appropriately, it's fine. Mike: Okay, and how did the rumors start that this could be used to be COVID. Tim: So it's a classic story, Mike. So whenever a new condition surfaces, like COVID, there's a rush to test all the– what are known as the FDA registered medicines. These are medicines that have been approved for one use or another either by the US government or by the European agencies. It's always easier to adapt an approved drug for new indication than to register a completely new medicine. It's just way cheaper, way faster. So everyone turns to “What have we already approved just to see if by some unexpected chance it would also work in this new condition?” And that's what happened here. People can grow the SARS-CoV-2 virus in cell culture. So we grow it in cell culture and throw every compound that is registered and approved into those cultures to see, “Does any of them work?” And hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which we'll talk about, they came out of that effort. There's a serious flaw with the strategy in this case. I will say, Mike, sometimes it works. Sometimes you find something you didn't expect. I don't think we'll have time to go into those exceptions but there are some. So a key-- and this is sort of basic science and I hope it's okay for everybody-- but a big factor is the kind of cell that you use to grow the virus to test it. Scientists typically use for viral diseases, a cell called the vero cell, which was derived from an African Green Monkey kidney. The reason they use this cell is because most viruses grow really well in it, so it's quite easy to adapt a new virus to that system. The problem is, it's not representative of the kinds of cells that say SARS-CoV-2, the COVID virus infect. Those would be human lung cells, if you will. So yes, hydroxychloroquine works at relatively high concentrations against the virus in vero cells. But it turns out if you do the same experiment with cultures of human lung cells, it really doesn't work at all, because the virus enters those cells in a way that's different than how it infects vero cells. Had we done the experiment properly, which is to use cultures of human lung cells, we wouldn't be having this conversation, Mike, because no one would have advanced hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure. I hope that answers okay, and I hope it's clear. It's not that the scientists who did this work had evil intentions, they did not. It's just that they used the wrong cell type, and people drew inappropriate conclusions from the result. Mike: Okay, let's switch gears to ivermectin. There's actually been a lot of misinformation about ivermectin on both sides of the don't-try-this-at-home debate. So in addition to the people on one side claiming that ivermectin can cure COVID, on the other side, you have people who are reducing ivermectin to just a horse dewormer. Tim: [laughs] Yeah. Well, ivermectin, like chloroquine is a wonder drug. Okay? First of all, ivermectin has revolutionized the treatment of parasites in animals, and we should not discount it. So maybe its primary use is actually in the prevention of heartworm infections in people's pets. It revolutionized the treatment of this. It's an important and extremely useful drug, but it also is very useful in people. It has been donated– More than a billion doses have been donated by Merck for the treatment of individuals infected with a couple of parasites in poor areas of the world, one is onchocerciasis or river blindness and the other is lymphatic filariasis or elephantiasis. So we have a huge history of use of the drug. It can be given once a year for these infections or twice a year. It's enormously important in tropical medicine. It is a human medicine. It is very safe as used. It's also extremely potent. So it takes very little of the drug to have a beneficial therapeutic effect. Mike: And how safe is it to experiment with? Tim: At the use doses, it's quite safe. There are isolated incidences which would never happen to people in the United States, for instance, or in regions that don't suffer from parasitic infections like this. It's very safe, but it can be overdosed. It's possible. One of the things that's really important to know, and I mentioned that it's very potent, right? So you give tiny doses to people who suffer from these parasitic infections, but the solutions that we use to treat animals, because animals are so much bigger than people, like horses or cows, for instance, they contain much higher amounts of the drug. And inappropriately taking those medicines you can get an overdose that has serious lethal concentrations and lethal implications, for instance. I think there have been a couple of fatalities in the US. So it should never be taken outside of a prescription by a physician. Mike: Okay. And where did the rumors about this one start from? Tim: [laughs] Exactly the same place, Mike. Ivermectin works against the virus in cell cultures, in vero cell cultures. It does not work in cultures of human lung cells, so there's no basis to presume that either of these drugs act by inhibiting the virus. I will also say that the concentrations of ivermectin that are required to be active even in the vero cells are 100 times higher than what you would see in a human dosed with a therapeutic amount of the drug. It's not even clear to me that even massive overdoses would give you enough of the drug in your blood to actually have this beneficial effect. The other problem, of course, that happened is people said, "Well, it's doing other things,” same with hydroxychloroquine, that maybe it's not inhibiting the virus but it has an immunosuppressive or some beneficial effect on immunity to the virus. That's unproven. I know of no real evidence that therapeutic doses of ivermectin for sure have this effect. Hydroxychloroquine is a kind of immunosuppressant and that is certainly not an effect you would like to see in acute infection, initial infection, because you need the immune system to combat the virus. It's possible that at later stages of more serious infections, when sometimes the human immune response can be over aggressive and cause pathology. That's why dexamethasone, which is a steroid that's used to suppress the immune system, has therapeutic benefit. But there's no reason to think that hydroxychloroquine will have any benefit over and above dexamethasone. And in fact, as you know, clinical trials in hospitalized patients showed no benefit whatsoever from hydroxychloroquine. Mike: And I would assume it's the same for ivermectin. Tim: It is. I'm sorry. It is. It's the same for ivermectin that we have treated hundreds of millions of people and literally billions of animals with this drug. No one has ever reported an antiviral effect or an immunosuppressive effect in these individuals. So we don't really have a mechanism that would explain either one. This becomes very important. I'm going to take a segue here if you don't mind. Mike: Hey, go for it. Tim: So right now ivermectin is undergoing clinical trials, not because of science but because of sort of public demand. These include several trials in the United States. The problem with a clinical trial like this is we have no hypothesized mechanism. So we don't have any way to judge, “How much ivermectin should we give to these people? What dose do we use? How frequently do we give it?” We have no idea what the target plasma concentration or blood concentration of the drug should be to have a beneficial effect on COVID. This makes the trial design extremely difficult. And it's going to complicate the interpretation. Right now some people think you have to take ivermectin all the time, other people think, “No, no, you just take it when you get sick.” We don't have a theoretical or any basis in theory to account for any of these outcomes. Mike: Okay. Switching gears again, I imagine in your relief work, you've encountered a bit of treatment and vaccine hesitancy, right? Tim: I think, Mike, just as a citizen, not necessarily have I sought it out. [laughs] I will say I have given a couple of other interviews about this and at least one of them generated a lot of negative feedback on my character because clearly ivermectin is a lifesaver and I'm doing a disservice. But in terms of vaccine hesitancy, I think it's coupled with enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. It's a rather bizarre demonstration of human susceptibility to anecdote and conspiracy. I will say, look, a lot of people that advocate either one of these drugs are not evil. I think they're misguided. I'm looking forward to the results of the clinical trials on ivermectin that I hope will quell some of this over-enthusiasm. I don't believe they are malicious actors, they just are misinformed. There is no scientific rationale to advocate either of them. Vaccine hesitancy is a bit different. It's grounded in ignorance. There's a political component to it, which is difficult for me to accept, that somehow it threatens individual liberty to require people to protect each other. I find that a bizarre and unhealthy development in our society. I suppose it's always been there. There is no reason to fear the vaccine. They're well-grounded in science, all of the various pipes that have been advanced. They have all been approved after regular rigorous study. None of them has nefarious intent. There is no conspiracy among major pharma companies about this. I'm a little bit concerned that the medicines that have recently been approved, I think, one from Merck and one from Pfizer as antivirals, I think they're valuable. But it also gives people an opt-out for the vaccine to say, "Well, if I get sick I can get cured." That's unfortunate. I probably haven't answered your question, have I? Mike: Well, I was gonna ask what you find motivates the vaccine hesitancy and what motivates the hesitancy to believe medical professionals, if you've encountered that in your personal interaction with patients. Tim: I have. I mean, I don't treat patients. I want to be clear about that. I'm just a scientist. But of course I have lots of conversations in my life with some people who don't agree that vaccines are important. Some people don't agree that the virus is actually real. They think it's a hoax perpetrated, somehow, I don't know how. I'm gonna-- not being a sociologist, I'm not sure how valid my opinion is, but I think one of the factors is that most people don't know any scientists. They don't really know their physicians as people. We've become a customer-client medical system. You're probably too young to remember sort of the family doctor that would sit and chat. I know there's still some GPs that do that, but a lot of this is now assembly line. You show up, you don't even get 10 minutes, and you're on to the next patient. Right? People don't know physicians as people, they don't know scientists at all. The demise of the public school system in the US and the advance of private schools means that people who are scientifically literate often send their kids to private schools, and they don't get a chance to interact with, I'm just gonna say, non-scientists very much. They don't coach softball or baseball or football teams, they don't go to PTA meetings. Our dependence on electronic communications, as you and I are now doing, diminishes the opportunity for interpersonal interaction or casual just to say, "Hey, I do this for a living and you shouldn't be afraid of me and the people like me." But there is a distrust, especially in the Western countries-- actually, it's global. In the so-called elite, there is this distrust of intellectual output. I gotta tell you, just recently, the National Science Foundation released survey data of 30% of the scientists and engineers in the US are foreign born. And that's another barrier to communication; people tend to view foreigners with suspicion. So there's been a disconnect in American society between this incredible technology that drives our society and the people who benefit from it, or participate in it almost as unwitting, unwilling guinea pigs, right? That's a long winded answer, I hope it's okay. Mike: [laughs] Well, it's a good one. So what research are you working on now? Tim: One of the things that I have become fascinated by is how parasites manipulate their hosts. So a lot of my work is how the molecules that parasites release into their hosts affect the host response to allow them to succeed. Some of the parasites I studied live for many, many years in the host, large kind of parasites, and you'd think we should be really good at getting rid of them. And we are, in fact, really good at getting rid of almost every parasite, but some few species have figured out how to 'live long and prosper' as Mr. Spock would say, in our bodies. So I'm really curious about how they accomplish that. The other project I'm involved with at the moment is with the Carter Center, and it's about a worm, a parasite called guinea worm in Africa, which has nearly been eradicated, but it has recently been found to not only infect people but dogs, and so we're trying to come up with a medicine that can be used to treat the parasite in dogs so that eventually we can eradicate it. This is a parasite that Jimmy Carter has said, "I hope the last guinea worm dies before I do." Mike: And what does a guinea worm do? Tim: Oh my gosh, you want to really get grossed out? Your listeners, go look it up. It's a parasite called Dracunculus medinensis. It's the little dragon of Medina. It lives beneath the skin. The females get to be at least half a meter long or even longer, and they burrow out of the skin, and lay their eggs basically in water. It's disfiguring. It's very painful. It's an example of a gross parasite, I will say. But it can be cured or can be prevented if you keep people from going into the water. So this is kind of a behavioral solution that the Carter Center has really promoted. Or if you use filtered straws to drink. It infects people by drinking water that's contaminated with parasites. It's a lovely story. It would be a wonderful thing to eradicate, and I hope we can do it. Mike: Oh, really important work, Tim. Thank you so much for coming on the Nazi Lies podcast to teach us about drugs. This was fun. Tim: It's a pleasure. I think it's important to recognise, Mike, that people involved in fighting this virus are not motivated by malicious intent. They really are working to benefit people to try to get control of the epidemic, and they want everyone to get vaccinated. But thank you for inviting me, I sincerely appreciate the opportunity. Mike: Well, thank you so much. Tim: And another time perhaps, my friend. Mike: Absolutely. If you liked what you heard and want to support the Nazi Lies podcast, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. Patrons get access to early episodes and membership in our book club. The early episodes can come in on any podcast app, and the book club is on Discord. Come join us as we read the books of our upcoming guests. It's a good conversation; your question may even end up on the show. Check us out at patreon.com/nazilies. [Theme song]

  Tim O'Brien along with his wife Becki, have created a unique vitamin, supplement and nutrition store that is more about helping people than it is about margins and commissions. As Tim says" Souls before sales!"   It was a pleasure sitting down with Tim to learn more about The Healthy Place and what products and services they have to offer.   After Tim educated me, I'm definitely going to lean on him and his team in the future, to help me make better and more educated decisions when it comes to my health.   I hope you enjoy this episode and you walk away with at least one snippet that either helps you in your entrepreneurial journey or with you health in general.   For 30% off, please use our affiliate link as it helps us to generate a little income to produce this podcast...thx so much!   https://findyourhealthyplace.com/?rfsn=5901087.08b0f6   Thanks for listening!   Joe   Tim O'Brien Founder - The Healthy Place Website: https://findyourhealthyplace.com/ Website: https://livelyvitaminco.com/ Website: https://wildtheory.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/applewellness/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thehealthyplaceTHP YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYQVVKB58mGd_YgxAL0LMGA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/apple-wellness-the-healthy-place/about/ Email: tim@findyourhealthyplace.com Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Tim: My guest today is Tim O'Brien, the founder of The Healthy Place, an e-commerce store for healthy products. They also have for brick and mortar locations, one in Madison, Wisconsin, one in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, one in Middleton, Wisconsin, and one in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Tim's passion is health and wellness, and he has spent the last decade sharing his passion with the world on a personal side. He is married to Becky and together they have three children. In this conversation with Tim, I expressed how much health and wellness is important to myself and how convoluted the marketplace is and very difficult to trust who you buy from and which products you buy. I was excited to have Tim on the show so that I could learn more about the difference in what the healthy place offers over buying products at other places like GNC, Walgreens, the vitamin shop and obviously Amazon.com. So sit back and listen to the education that we get from Tim on how to buy better and healthier products in the health and wellness space. Joe: Hey, Tim, welcome to the show. Tim: Hey, hey, how you doing, buddy? Joe: I'm doing great, man, happy, what is it? Wednesday, I lost track, I just got Tim: Yeah, Joe: Back into Tim: It's Joe: Town. Tim: Hump hump day of the week, man, and Joe: Beautiful. Tim: I'm doing this to say thank you for giving me a chance to be on your show. Man, this is cool. Joe: Yeah, no, that's my pleasure, as as I mentioned before, we actually started this that I have, you know, I know that literally health is everything. Like you can have everything in the world that you ever, ever wanted. And without your health, it's just, you know, it's it's unfortunate because I know people go through things that had nothing to do with them not being healthy. They just got delivered a bad hand, Tim: Yahav. Joe: You know, so that's a different story. But those of us Tim: Jerome. Joe: That can make sure we stay healthy, there are things that we can do. But before we get into all of that, and as a lot of my listeners for the podcast and the viewers of a YouTube channel, now, I'd like to get the back story because a lot of the people who listen to the show are my hope is that these entrepreneurial spirits that are trying to figure out what they want to do are there in the midst of doing it. And they they need ideas from people that are being successful doing it. So I would like to go back as far as you're willing to go back to allow myself and the viewers to understand how you got into what you're doing today. What Tim: I love Joe: For? Tim: To share that. Yeah. Joe: Yeah, like what triggered the fact that you're now in this world of, you know, Tim: Supplements, Joe: The health world Tim: Natural Joe: And. Tim: Alternatives, Joe: Yeah, Tim: Yeah. Joe: Yeah, yeah. So I'd love to hear that and then we'll get in, Tim: I'd love to. It's Joe: Ok. Tim: A cool story, I kind of like telling it because it's just cool to see how things can work together to sort of bring you to the place that you're at. And it's sort of confirmation in some different ways. So I love to share it, man. I'd be happy to do so when my when I was like five or six years old, my mom fought through thyroid cancer. And I remember her like going through the chemo radiation and losing the hair, like seeing her at the hospital. I have four siblings, so just a lot of fear in the home, worried about mom. And then I remember this time where she came home and she was sort of like excited and sort of like filled with a little bit of hope because she had gone into this health food store in a little town called Muskego, Wisconsin, just this tiny little town that had a health food store. And she talked to this guy named John for like an hour and a half. And John shared with her all these natural alternatives that had some good science and some good reason to believe that it could help her in her process recovery, treatment of the thyroid cancer. And so she would like go in there like once a week, whether it was a refill for some supplements or whether it was some more education, because there was a lot of literature that this guy handed out as well, like books that he gave her. Tim: And I would go with her. And through this whole process, she she was benefited quite a bit from these natural alternatives that helped her and her recovery process. So I remember hearing about that as a little guy. And through that process, she got a job as a manager at this health food store. And she was there all the time, 40, 50 hours a week kind of thing. And us kids were home schooled. So we would go with mom often sitting in this back room of this health food store, doing our math problems, doing our schoolwork. And I watched over the years these testimonies produced of people coming in with chronic pain, depression, sleep issues, other folks that battled cancer, that my mom held their hand through the process, educating them. And so that was like my whole upbringing. And it really got into my DNA that there is natural alternatives out there that work and the general population just doesn't know about them, because the way our medical system set up pharmaceutical medications, you know, we have some of the best doctors in the world. And, you know, you go to them, you get a prescription, you don't Joe: Mm Tim: Necessarily Joe: Hmm. Tim: Get a natural alternative recommendation. So I got a bit passionate about that in my late teen years. So I got a job at a GNC franchise and worked for the owner who invited me to move out to Madison, Wisconsin, to manage some of his GNC stores after a little while. So I was like, man, OK, my boss thinks I'm good at this. I really enjoy helping people, encouraging people. I just happen to like like people in general. So it was it was sort of a fit. Like I got this passion for this natural alternative thing. I feel like I'm helping people. I'm impacting the world. I want to make a difference. And I was managing these GNC franchises in Madison, Wisconsin. Well, there was a corporate takeover, dude, in twenty seven where everybody lost their jobs, like corporate took over these six franchises that my boss owned. And it was like, OMG, like, what am I going to do now? And so I determined, you know, hey, I want to do something. And that's natural alternative space. I have always been sort of passionate about business in general. I had like three paper routes when I was 11 and I hired my sisters for a quarter a day. I was making bank Joe: Right. Tim: And I was so I tried a network marketing business for a little while that was suppliments and that was brutal. Multi-level marketing can be really hard. And I was like, OK, I don't want to go that route. Maybe I should open my own health food store. And at that time I had just met dating, married Becky, my wife. So we're prayerfully like thinking through this. Should we do this, put the house on the line, open up our own health food store and risk everything. And we decided to take the plunge. So our first brick and mortar store, 2010, was in a town called Fitchburg, Wisconsin, which is right outside of Madison, Wisconsin. And then twenty fifteen, it was store number two in the Madison area and then twenty nineteen with stores three and four. So that was going well. We then moved towards ecommerce where like, hey, if we're making an impact and a difference here locally, which is really exciting, we really enjoy it together. We work as a team like let's let's hit the nation. That sounds fun. And so we started to see a little bit of success there, especially ones covid hit of last year because our in-store traffic took a hit. So our pivot as a company, like a lot of smart companies, was, let's focus on e-commerce. And so that really helped us talk about a blessing in disguise, really helped Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Us figure out the e-commerce space a little bit. So really exciting. In December, January of this last year, we got our little warehouse. So now we have a warehouse in Madison and we're shipping packages out all over the United States. And that's the story. And the mission is about impacting, empowering and educating as many people as we can to just like, learn, grow and create a lifelong foundation of health and wellness. It's like a fanning a flame. You know, somebody already just has a little spark. You know, they're putting the cigarette out outside my store, throwing the McDonald's bag in the trash and like, I need something for my chronic pain all the way up to the health enthusiasts. And no matter what, to me, it's so encouraging to just fan the flame of someone's health and wellness. Because you said it earlier, life is a gift and people need to remember that. Joe: Yeah, and so have you always, based on the background of sitting in that store with your mother and seeing what the proper nutrition and supplements and things like that did for her? Did you always pretty much lead a healthy lifestyle? Tim: Funny is Joe: Don't Tim: No. Joe: Tell me you're a fast food junkie. Tim: No, I wasn't. Yeah, I was, and I always felt very bad if I was going through that fast food line, but my diet really didn't really take a huge impact until I married Becky. So for whatever reason, I would I knew a lot about supplements, really passionate about natural alternatives. But I was I was not the guy who is eating ultra clean, raw, organic, clean. I was like, OK, I'm going to eat a basic diet cleaner than most know what kind of excuses that. And then I'd lean on supplements for nutrition. And so when I met Vecchi, this is two thousand eight, she's like, wow, this doesn't even make sense. Like you can't go eat at pizza, frozen pizza, you know, and then go take your supplements. And so she really convicted me. And it's been a pretty cool team because that's always been her passion is very clean eating. And she didn't understand or know about the supplement natural alternative thing. And my passion has always been for my mom's story of natural alternatives and supplements can change a life. And so then getting married and working together as a team to educate Madison and our social media platforms and on YouTube, it's like there has to be a marriage between nutritional deficiencies, making sure we don't have them eating well, eating clean exercise. So we should work together. And I've improved since meeting, Becky. Joe: Wow, so are you actually telling me that she was already before you guys even met, she was interested in this sort of thing or she was she was Tim: Yeah. Joe: A healthy, clean eating person. Tim: Yes, she was Joe: Wow. Tim: A health enthusiast, yeah, I mean, just health, and that's part of what drew me to her is like, man, this girl's got discipline, like extreme self-control. For me, that's been an area of struggle, just like in general, like discipline waking up early. I'm the guy that would, before I met Becky, like stay up till one and then sleep till nine till I had to quit, get to work. And, you know, he's like, man, we got some work to do. But, yeah, she sure inspired me and a few of those areas. Joe: Ok, so without prying too deeply then, because now you're really piqued, my interest is the fact that you guys are lying so well. How did you meet? Tim: Yeah, so we there was like a young adults meeting through it, through church called Metro Believers Church in Madison, Wisconsin, you know, I'm a Christian, she's a Christian, and in my early twenties, it was like, hey, I really enjoyed finding people like minded. And I think in the back of my mind, I'm like, I'm searching for a life, you know? So I would go to a couple of these different churches, young adult ministry meetings, whatever, 20 something groups. And we just started hanging out. So it was like a group of like six or seven of us. And I was about six months in. I pulled her aside one day after church and said, I still laugh at what I said. I said, Hey, Becky, I've taken a shining to you and I'd like to continue on to marriage. And she's like, oh my gosh. Like, OK, I'm kind of like you, too. It was weird way to ask, but OK. Joe: It's also that's Tim: Yeah, Joe: Old school, Tim: I don't do it right. Oh, yeah. Joe: But also Tim: Oh. Joe: All right, cool, well, that's that's great. So how did you change or why did you change the name from Apple Wellness to the healthy place? Tim: Yeah, really good question, you know, Apple Wellness was a good name, you know, in the sense of like Apple a day keeps the doctor away and we just had too many people thinking we are the Mac Apple store. So I literally get calls, at least weekly, Joe: Wow, Tim: And Joe: That's so subtle. Tim: At least I know, and then I'd see my employee across the way and he'd be talking to somebody and he'd be like, well, try turning the phone off and then turn it back on, you know? Joe: Oh, my Tim: So Joe: God. Tim: Especially after he got the e commerce thing going, I started, Becky, as the graphic designer and kind of branding expert within our company for a long time. She's like the Apple word's taken. That's just gone. And I should have consulted with her a little bit more before we chose the name. Joe: Uh huh. Tim: And so she's always kind of wanted it changed. But then I found out that Apple, the company, has an Apple wellness program Joe: Oh, Tim: For employees Joe: Of. Tim: Like it's trademarked. I mean, so I figured it was just a matter of time before I end up getting some sort of litigation letter from Joe: Yeah, Tim: Apple. Joe: Yeah, well, OK, that's interesting. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So you stole one of my questions, but it was perfect because it was actually in line with what you were talking about. But I want to go back to it because Tim: Sure. Joe: It's important, again, for like the entrepreneurs that are listening to this and what we just went through with covid, you talked about shifting. They're not shifting, but literally adding to what you've already established. Right. So you were Tim: You. Joe: You were a retail store, people walking in foot traffic. That's what you counted on to make a living. Right. So when covid hit, obviously, everyone stayed home. So there goes all the foot traffic. So did you already have the e commerce portion of this set up before this happened when you said it was a blessing in disguise? Were you already ready to go the moment like that? Tim: Really Joe: The Tim: Good. Joe: You know, Tim: Yes, Joe: The doors. Tim: Yes and no, I Joe: Ok. Tim: Mean, it's like we had the website, we had the ability to set up ship products out. We had maybe three hundred out of the four thousand products that we have in our stores on the site. So we were ready in certain ways and then not ready for a lot of things. And we had no idea on the digital side of marketing, Google ads, Facebook ads, SEO optimization, email marketing. We hadn't done text messaging. We hadn't done very much of that, very basic and each one of those areas. So it was all of a sudden like pedal to the metal once March hit, where it was like, OK, we have some of these basic fundamentals. And I always tell a business owner like you, if you don't already, you have to have a website like I mean, covid showed us all that pretty quick, like Joe: Yeah. Tim: Have to have a website and you can get free ones are very inexpensive. Wick's dotcom. I'll tell business owners, like even if you're not a photographer, don't don't try to be don't don't get some real basic a white posterboard. Put the product right over it. Just take a picture by a window. Don't don't try to get real clever with it because Vecchi tells me that it can end up looking really bad if Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: You're trying to do so. Basic things like get a website, get a social media, you know, ask your grandkid if you don't know how to set one up sort of thing. So we had all the basics, but then for us it was like, OK. Let's get live chat on our website, because we are one of our difference makers, is consultations Joe: Huh? Tim: With we change lives because we ask questions and we figure out the best products and forms and brands for their specific issues, problems. So let's get a live chat on our website so we can have those conversations. Let's get free shipping. Let's make it really easy. Even if we lose money on maybe one out of five orders, let's just like make it easy, reduce friction in any way that we can. Let's get on Google ads and Facebook ads. So we hired a digital agency for that and it's pretty cool. A year later, we had 30 percent overnight of our foot traffic was just gone once we were able to stay open, thankfully. But that 30 percent in one year's time, we were able to build that on our e-commerce platforms. We were able to replace what was lost. So I'm still head spinning, so thankful for my team able to bring that together because it's quite the operation and it takes a lot of work. Joe: Yeah, did you did you keep the stores open themselves or did you? Tim: We did Joe: You did OK. Tim: Not. Joe: Ok, Tim: We Joe: And Tim: Were Joe: Was it. Tim: Scrambling in the beginning of if we could be classified as essential or not, and my belief is that the immune system is something that can really be strengthened. I'm more passionate about terrain versus the germs so we can strengthen our terrain, strengthen our immune systems, both defense and offense. I mean, there's incredible science behind simple nutrients like sand, mucus from elderberry. The University of Sydney showing the prevention which with elderberry prevention of viruses entering the cell. I mean, it's some pretty cool science. So at the beginning of the covid thing, it was like, OK, I'm not going to tell anybody I can cure or prevent Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Whatever, but I'm sure as heck going to yell it from the rooftop that you can strengthen your immune system and a strong immune system. Strong health is the best defense against any disease, virus, sickness anywhere. So I got pretty passionate about that a year ago. Joe: Cool. Yeah, that's great. So I'm normally pretty good at not bouncing around, but in this case, I want to go back to when you decided to do this. You know, obviously when when someone gets released from a corporate environment and they're like, oh, my gosh, I don't have control over my own destiny because these people Tim: The. Joe: Just literally rip the rug out from underneath me, which is another thing that a lot of entrepreneurs know because this is how they got to where they are there that happen to them. Like I'm not letting someone else dictate how my life is going to turn out. Right. So Tim: Yeah. Joe: But what's really crazy is I don't know if it if in Wisconsin or the places where you have these stores, obviously we know that you already brought it up at GNC is a big brand around the country. There's also where we are. There's the vitamin store. Right. Are the stuff that one of those Tim: Yeah, Joe: Is a vitamin Tim: Yeah, Joe: Shopper. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So there's a lot of these places. So it's almost like you saying you and Becky going, oh, yeah, we're going to create the next pizza delivery like pizza Tim: Now, Joe: Delivery Tim: There's already Joe: Franchise. Tim: 10 right around Joe: Yeah, Tim: The corner, Joe: Right. Tim: So let's see number 11, yeah. Joe: Right. It's we're going to be the next Pizza Hut or Papa John's or whatever. It's just like that that industry Tim: Yes, Joe: That's it takes a lot Tim: It's Joe: Of guts. Tim: So competitive. Joe: Yeah. So when you thought about it, as all entrepreneurs, do, we always come up with these ideas and then we sometimes will kill our own ideas without our spouse or partner or someone will say they'll be the sensible one and say Tim: Right, Joe: That's Tim: Right, Joe: Never Tim: Yeah. Joe: Right. But then you have all these outside influences of of friends and things. And, you know, at any moment, if you would have said, hey, we're thinking of opening up a vitamin supplement, healthy sort of Tim: John. Joe: That people would look at you. But what about all of these major brands? So tell me about how you got over the hump to make to pull the trigger. Tim: Yeah, do that's such a good question and, you know, to identify and I had some friends who opened a coffee shop, you know, and a year later, you know, the coffee shops not doing so well is unfortunate with covid timing and everything. And it's like the supplement thing where you, like, hear this and you're like, oh, I don't know, you know, I wish him well, but I don't know if that's going to work because it's just like there's a hundred of them, you know. Joe: Right. Tim: So I think for me what happened was I worked for GNC for, I don't know, five years. And you start to see good stuff. You start to see bad stuff, you start to see their model. They were purchased by China a while back. So, OK, it's all sourced from China. Forms of nutrients are in their synthetic forms or not so absorbable forms. And you start to learn like, OK, a better product would help this person more than this form of curcumin that's not absorbing into their system from China or wherever, you know, so you start to see where you could make a difference and you sort of start to see your difference makers. So in the supplement world, there's two veins of supplement stores. There's the type of stores that are all about muscle gain and weight loss, you know, weight loss, thermogenic high caffeine, ephedra, and then trim and tracks Hydroxycut. And a lot of that isn't super healthy for Joe: Hmm. Tim: People to be taking steroids or pro hormones, you know, not super healthy. So that's like one vein of supplement stores. And then there's another vein of supplement stores that just they sourced from China. They use synthetic nutrients. It's a little bit more about margin and profit than it is about quality and making a difference. And so that is something I realized pretty early on. And there's not too many supplement health food stores that have a lot of knowledge where you walk in. And there's not just like a high schooler selling the huge jug of protein because it gets a two dollar commission on it, you know. Joe: Yes, I do know. Tim: Yeah, yeah. And there's just not a lot of those out there. So then all of a sudden starting to dream about, you know, originating from my mom's story where somebody really helped her out, where I can really make a difference, because if I open my own stores or store at the time, I can bring in some of the best brands in the world. And pretty quick, in any industry, you find out, good, better, best. And I want to be in that best category. And all of a sudden you're working with some of the best brands in the world and you have the knowledge to be a to guide somebody with Crohn's disease. Let's just Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Talk over asthma on natural alternatives that really work. And if you impact them, if you help them, if you change their life a little bit for the better, now they're going to keep coming back forever. And they tell everybody they know because there's such a vacuum, such a desperate need in this day and age for knowledgeable resources in the natural alternative space. We have a ton of medical, we have a ton of pharmaceutical drugs. We just don't have information coming to the general public on natural alternatives that work. And I get to be that resource in Madison, Wisconsin. So I think that's why we have done well in our brick and mortar stores. And I think that's probably why our attention is higher for our e-commerce is because of that customer service, that knowledgeable resource, that going the extra mile to impact their lives. And I'll give you an example. A lady might hit our live chat from California and say, hey, I'm looking for a V12. Can you give me a recommendation? And then we might ask the question like, absolutely. Here's a couple of options. Do you mind if I ask while you're while you're taking V12? Oh, my doctor said because I have really low energy, I have nerve pain and my mental clarity and focus, I get like foggy brain all the time. So then all of a sudden we say, awesome, OK, I'm actually going to encourage the method in form of V12 because it absorbs much better than this sign form that I first sent you, because I really want you to feel the difference. And since you're feeling fatigued, a little brain fog, I'd love for you to consider this adrenal boost product that has adapted genic herbs in there, like Atul Gawande wrote Rodeo Mocca because ninety two percent of fatigue is related to your adrenal glands. So then you recommend that product. They get it. And this lady two months later goes, Oh my gosh, my energy is a little better, my focus is better, my stress is reduced, which I didn't even bring up. But that adrenal product helps with stress, too, I guess. Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Then all of a sudden they're leaving a review like, wow, that wellness consultant, Ryan, he's one of our our wellness consultants. He really helped me out. And so it's a very different sort of dynamic than a typical GNC store, health food store, vitamin shop type experience. They're Joe: Huh? Tim: All great stores. I mean, I love Natural. Anywhere you can get them. So that was like our difference maker and that's why I thought I could make a go out of it. Joe: Ok, cool. I have so much to ask you now, because you keep opening up like Kansas. So. So before again, I, I want this stuff to be helpful for the entrepreneur. And then then we're going to help the consumers that listen to this. So how when you decided on doing this and said, OK, and let's pull the trigger, how did you figure out the place where you're going to open up store number one, that you do all that extensive, Tim: Oh, Joe: You know, Tim: Good question, yes. Joe: Traffic, you know, what's going to pop up around us? What Tim: You know, Joe: Is, you Tim: Find Joe: Know? Tim: Find a good broker, a real estate broker that can find you spaces. So I had a guy named Kent in Madison, Wisconsin, and he you don't have to pay these guys. You know, it's the landlord that pays them. Joe: Right. Tim: And so as a young entrepreneur about to, like, risk everything you had, that was really important for me to know. Like, I I still am shocked by that. Like, you can just call one of these guys, try to find a reputable one, find somebody that trusts that can make a good referral. And they do all this scouting for you. They send you all the reports and you don't pay a penny. You know, I am a bottom line at the end or something, but you don't pay a penny for this. They get paid from the landlord. So he was bringing me idea after idea after idea. And he had been in the industry for a long time. So he knew the city really, really well. And he was able to guide me through, hey, this has a really strong anchor. The anchor in Fitchburg was Joe: Yeah, Tim: Target. Joe: Yeah. Tim: It was a super, super target. So I was like, oh, learning about anchors are important, Joe: Yeah. Tim: Really important. So I tell you, if you're listening, like, look for some strong anchors, because that's really going to help you for traffic. Joe: And just for the listeners and the people that don't like it, like when they talk about like a small strip mall or a plaza or something like that or even in a in a mall small, an anchor is an anchor store. That is when they go in, there's a really good chance they're not going away like they are a big thing like Target or Wal-Mart Tim: Exactly. Joe: Or Nordstrom or whatever. So I just wanted to clear that up because I didn't know at one point. But I know when you're looking at retail space like that, you want to be surrounded by an anchor store that has been around forever and is not going away. Tim: Yes, and just to further drive that point home, we have for brick and mortar stores and the one that's doing like the worst is the one that doesn't have a strong anchor by it. So just get one with a strong anchor and then look at price points and definitely negotiate. So we had that broker that was able to help us out. He was able to negotiate tenant improvement. Our big deal when you're opening a store, because you you could use money towards the build out and you can ask landlords for that. So if, again, if you have a good broker and you tell them your story, what you're trying to build out, a lot of times you can get a number of things paid for by the landlord because they're about to ask you to sign a five year lease. Joe: Mm hmm. OK. So at this point, the four locations that you have, you are in a lease situation Tim: Yes, all for you Joe: At Tim: And I've Joe: Any Tim: Looked into purchasing. Joe: Ok, so there is yeah, that's my question. It's like when do you pull the trigger on saying, OK, I want to actually start to own some of these buildings are these spaces. And that's a huge job. That's that's really put your Tim: Yeah, Joe: Neck out. Right. Tim: So in all four, I looked at them and each one has a different story, the first one I looked into though, at the Fitchburg location, the buildings were not for sale. So I was like, all this is so cool. So I looked into it and it was seven million dollars for these two buildings because it's in a strong anchor, high traffic area. So it is difficult to buy the spot by the strong anchor Joe: Maha. Tim: Because it really it would have been risking I couldn't I couldn't do it. But then the idea next idea is like, well, maybe I should move locations now that my name is established, if I can buy a strip mall down the way or something like that. So that Joe: Te. Tim: Idea is in the back of my head. But then you move away from the strong anchors. That's Joe: Right. Tim: Been called me back. Joe: Right, cool. See, that was perfect because that was like all of the things that you have to consider and Tim: Right. Joe: It's yeah, that's a tough decision, man. That's a lot of money. Tim: It is, Joe: Yeah. Tim: Dude, I Joe: Yeah. Tim: Know and I have a buddy who owns a dentistry office and he Joe: We. Tim: Was able to purchase his location and it's awesome. He's about to pay it off after ten years. And I'm super excited. So Joe: Yeah. Tim: It is depends on the situation. Joe: Yeah, OK, so now let's get into what I consider in the world that you're in and I'm a huge fan of natural like I is, it's a there's a difference between naturopathic or is. Right. Is that pronounced correctly? Is that they say it Tim: Yeah, Joe: Now Tim: Naturopathic Joe: Or Tim: Medicine Joe: Or homoeopathic. Tim: Homoeopathy yupp homoeopathy Joe: Right. OK. Tim: And integrative medicine is kind of like medical and naturopathy together. Joe: Yep, yep, so Joel and my life partner went through a battle of breast cancer where she had some lymph nodes and luckily, you know, Tim: Giese. Joe: Through through chemo and radiation, she came out on the other side and everything's great. But Tim: Good. Joe: The big thing that she also had was she had a naturopathic doctor Tim: Hmm. Joe: That went that came from the cancer world. So the advantages is that he understood the treatment that was happening with the normal medicine and he knew what to give her to not take away from what she was doing with the chemo and radiation, but at the same time helped to keep her system built up and not offset any of that. So there was a perfect marriage between the two. And Tim: That's. Joe: I swear to this day, I feel like that was the reason that she was Tim: Wow. Joe: Fairly, fairly normal through the process, like we were doing 90 X and she was in the middle Tim: That's Joe: Of chemo Tim: All Joe: And radiation. Tim: Right. Joe: Yeah, it was ridiculous. So Tim: Dude, that's Joe: So Tim: Awesome. Joe: I'm a big fan of the naturopathic side of things and natural remedies and all of that. So Tim: Not the. Joe: So that's why this was a cool episode for me, because it's hard to talk with somebody that is in this niche that you're in without it being the big stores. And so my first question, because I got so many of them Tim: I Joe: First question and the first Tim: Love Joe: Question Tim: It. Joe: Is how do you become with all of the misinformation that's out Tim: The. Joe: In the world? Right. And this is what confuses all of us as consumers. You go to Amazon and you say, I need a B vitamin of Tim: Right Joe: Some B supplement. Tim: Now. Joe: And the habit is you you click on the five star rating, things that you want. You think that's going to be the best because people are taking their time to read it, which Tim: Yeah. Joe: I think there's enough Tim: What Joe: Conversation Tim: Did he. Joe: In the world that says that's not necessarily true. Tim: Right. Joe: And then you literally are just like throwing darts at a dartboard with Tim: I Joe: A blindfold Tim: Know that, Joe: On. So. Tim: I know. Joe: So how do you get through all the misinformation that you feel so confident enough that when you when you suggest something to a client that you haven't been taken advantage of by the misinformation, like Tim: Yeah, Joe: How do you get through Tim: Because. Joe: All of that stuff? Tim: A great question and even the reviews, if a company markets really well and they're incredible at marketing, they can get a billion, five star reviews and they can be like synthetic sourced from China, not NSF certification. So over the years, you start to be able to read between the lines and you start to be able to say, hey, this is B.S. over here. This is marketing. Only not met with quality. And like any industry, you start to learn the good, better and best. So there's a few things. So first and foremost, I think everybody needs somebody on their team. Like your wife has that naturopathic doctor now as a resource that she can probably shoot an email to or make an appointment with and ask these questions. I think everybody needs somebody on their team because most people have a medical doctor and beyond that and they might have a pharmacist. Right. And they're good to have on your team, but we need somebody with. Expertise, knowledge, history in the supplement space, because even a naturopathic doctor, they know way more than I do about the human body, about maybe. Yeah, just just how to treat maybe disease. Tim: Right. When you're in the supplement space, there is you get to deal with hundreds and hundreds of brands. And over the decades, which I think 18 years now, you start to find out what brands are good and trustworthy and which ones aren't because the FDA doesn't regulate all the supplements. So you can say whatever you want on the label about me, your romantic drink here, but you can say whatever you want and. FDA isn't going to necessarily nail you if you're lying, if your label is making false label claims and this happens, there was a clinic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where not real clinical, but where they took products from a number of stores, GNC, Walgreens, Wal-Mart and Target. They took supplements from those four stores and then they had them tested at Chavannes and it was Chavannes Labs. And all four of them had discrepancies with what the label said and what was actually in the capsule. And one product was an Asia product, which is good for the immune system. And it had zero percent echinacea in there and a little bit of garlic like Joe: Oh, Tim: What Joe: My Tim: The H Joe: Gosh. Tim: Now? Yeah. So that exactly what you said. It's shooting in the dark. Is it marketing that's producing these reviews? Is it quality? Is it going to help me? Is it a waste of my money? Am I being sold. Right. So there's all those questions and the privilege that I'm so thankful for is just being submersed in the supplement world long enough. You learn a couple of things. So sourcing is vital. Where is it coming from? There is vitamin C that you can get our China, that there's some concerns there with chemicals, heavy metals, arsenic, or you can get vitamin C from Scallan, which happens to have a really rich ascorbic acid form of vitamin C clean, great place to source it from. So where a product is sourced from is really important. Number two is does the brand have NSF certification? So NZDF C, GMP grade facilities that they work with, which they're paying money to NSF to a third party test and ensure that they're having all of these practices that are healthy for supplements, they're sourcing their cleanliness. Has it been tested? Is it clean? Those questions? And NSF doesn't care about the company. They care about the reputation. So there sure as heck going to just that's a good certification is trusted in the supplement world to ensure that what's on the label is actually in the product. Tim: So sourcing No. One, NSF, GMP certification, number two and number three, which all of these take some sort of expertise or having somebody on your your team. You know, that's why I say to have somebody on your team first. But number three is the forms of nutrients. So E 12, which I gave the example earlier, Psion Kabalan and B 12 is synthetic. So your body has to convert it and you lose a lot of the content in that conversion versus a methyl form B 12, which is the natural form that your body absorbs really, really well. So four items, number one and two, saucing and NSF, you can have a very clean form of sign Kabalan and B 12 source, very clean. You could have NSF facility ensuring that you have that 50 micrograms of cyanide Kabalan B 12 in the B complex. But then it would take some expertise to know, like, OK, that's fine, that's good. But we would prefer a methyl form would be 12 because it absorbs so much better Joe: Mr.. Tim: And every single nutrient. This blows my mind because every single nutrient has good, better, best. You know, whether you're talking about vitamin C, ascorbic acid, sodium ascorbic calcium ascorbic B 12, which I'm talking about the six paroxetine hydrochloride versus toxified phosphate turmeric. You can get the the turmeric that colors your Indian curry orange and you can take that capsule and it's good for you. It just doesn't do very much for inflammation unless you extract the curcumin out and then even that doesn't have a good absorption rate. So blending it with the turmeric, essential oils and the sunflower lecithin launch the absorption where it's literally absorbing two hundred to five hundred times better than the turmeric Indian spice that you started with. And that's the form of ninety five. That's the form that Baylor University of Texas is using to literally treat cancer and chronic pain with incredible results. I mean, the cancer story is very cool. Inflammation is the root of the root system of cancer. Joe: Mm, huh. Tim: So that's an example where it's like oh man form so saucing, NZDF, GMP, great facility forms of nutrients. Those are the big three that you want to look at to know quality. Right. So that's what I always tell somebody, find somebody that you can trust. So for you guys, it might be your your doctor that your wife worked with for in Madison, Wisconsin. A lot of people trust the healthy place to help guide them, know we don't do commission so that we can just recommend what's best so Joe: Right. Tim: People can use that live chat feature on our website to just ask those questions. But find a health food store maybe that is trustworthy in your home town, that you do meet a job like my mom met John Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Or find a store like mine that you can connect with and you can go to when health strikes, health problems strike because everybody has some conditions, some problem, something, even if it's something as simple as fatigue, you know. Ninety two percent of fatigue is related to your adrenal glands. You can strengthen your adrenal glands and you can have more vibrant energy every day. And people just don't know that. So they keep reaching for the coffee or the soda or the caffeine pills, what have you. So get somebody on your team that you can trust. Joe: So go. So you said at one point in this conversation that do you have over 4000 Tim: Products, yeah. Joe: Excuse now, right? OK, so let's just take that as an example. It's a full time job for someone like you to be the Tim: Yes. Joe: Gatekeeper Tim: Yeah. Joe: Of your of the healthy place. You have to be the gatekeeper to say, yes, this comes into our door and gets put on ourselves or in our e-commerce store or Tim: The. Joe: No, this doesn't meet the criteria. So to me, it feels like it's continuing education and literally a full time job for whoever that person. Let's just say it's you at the moment that Tim: Yeah. Joe: Is the person that says yay or nay on these products. So it's just mind boggling what is out there and what you have to do to sort of educate yourself to to say, yes, this makes the cut, not only doesn't make the cut, but it's in a product. It's not a product and not a C product, you Tim: Yeah, Joe: Know what I mean? Tim: You're Joe: So. Tim: Absolutely right. And it's like reading a book, though, you don't want to minimize what I do, it's like it's not hard for you to read English, you know, after you've learned it. But if you're learning a new language, it looks like totally confusing. Overwhelming can take me forever to learn this language. And it might take some years to learn it. Once you have that language mastered, it's just like reading a book, you know, Joe: Yeah. Tim: You just check the boxes, right. OK, where is the source from NSF? GMP, what's the forms of these nutrients? Because you start to learn and then you have experts that you follow. A lot of people smarter than me that I follow. Dr. X, Dr. While, Dr. Whitaker, Dr. Northrup. And you start Terry Lambrew and you start to follow these gurus in the southern industry that have been there for 40 years, that know so much more than you. And you're reading their literature, listening to their podcasts. They're the symposiums around the planet that are going on for this breakthrough, that breakthrough. You get the subscriptions right to the. So I just tell everyone, get plugged in at least where you're getting encouraged on a regular basis to own your health, build your terrane strength in your health and all the ways that you can inspire yourself on a regular basis and then get somebody on your team that you can trust to help guide you in the space, because it is a new language, right? Joe: It's nuts, it's just it's so frustrating. Did a three month vegan plan Tim: Nice. Joe: Because Tim: Yeah. Joe: I'm not vegan, but I loved it like it was good for me. But I Tim: Yeah. Joe: Actually I actually, in the process, lost a lot of muscle mass because I was also going always going to the gym. But all of a sudden I started to shrink both, Tim: Right, Joe: You Tim: Like, Joe: Know. Tim: No. Joe: So, yes, I'm like, I'm doing all this hard work. And it's just I needed to get on a B 12 vitamin of something. And it's funny because I don't even know what I'm taking, but it's something that I got from Amazon and Tim: Your Joe: I Tim: I can do it. I've been assigned to general Joe: I'm sure. Tim: Check that Joe: So Tim: After Joe: I'm going Tim: The program. Joe: To look when yeah. When we're done, I'm going to look and then I'm going to and then I'm going to say I need a direct line to Tim in Tim: There Joe: The Tim: We Joe: Chat Tim: Go. Joe: Room. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So have you ever thought of franchises? Tim: I have, I Joe: And Tim: Have. Joe: And I'm Tim: You Joe: Just interested you don't have to you don't have to Tim: Know, Joe: Say to. Tim: I'm so I am very interested and I have been kicking that ball around in my head for a long time because we are we specialize in education, right. So you got to find ways to duplicate yourself in a franchise. And so we created a three month curriculum that our wellness consultants have to go through. They have to pass quizzes and tests and they have to get certifications from this company, this company and MKB certification, all the enzyme certifications to understand the industry, know what questions to ask customers and how to make recommendations. So that's one of the hardest things that we've done that would make it more easy to duplicate the knowledge side of our company and our brand. And as I've talked to people who have created franchises, the the legal side to it is one hurdle and then enforcing them to actually maintain your model as representing the healthy place. What we have created is the two big unknowns for me as far as difficulty. So then the choice came, should we just keep adding brick and mortars in our own territory? Right, right. In the Madison area and then put all of our energy and focus into our brands that we've created and our website because there's infinite you can do in the business world and you kind Joe: Mm Tim: Of Joe: Hmm. Tim: Have to choose. Joe: Yeah. Tim: So we decided to park the franchise idea for now and really go after lively vitamin CO. This is one of the brands that have been borne out of our brick and mortar stores. So now we're selling that to other health food stores around the country. And the number two is build find your healthy place dotcom, because just like Amazon is a freakin mammoth, there's so much opportunity to impact and power and educate everything that I'm passionate about on that website. So currently with four kids, we are chilling on the franchise idea. But I think it's brilliant because there's not there's not the option out there, which is why it keeps coming back to me Joe: Yeah, Tim: Like Joe: Yeah. Tim: There's not that many health food stores out there that really care. Soulsby for sales. You know, as one of my Joe: Mm Tim: Saying Joe: Hmm. Tim: That, Joe: I Tim: I really Joe: Love that, by the way, I love that. Tim: Thank you. Thank you. There is a time I was praying and it was like not I it going to make my friggin mortgage. When I first opened the store, I was praying to God for sales and I was like, God to declare bankruptcy here is brutal. And it was like an arrow is like, do you care about their soul as much as you care about the sales? Joe: Yeah. Tim: And it was kind of striking. So, yeah, there's not that many stores out there that really care about the human that have knowledge to help guide them and a model that works to help people, you know. So it's still an idea that keeps coming back to me. So Joe: Right. Tim: We'll see. Joe: Yeah, well, good luck if it happens, I'm sure it'll be great. Tim: Thank you. You see one popping up next door, you'll know where to get your V12. Joe: There you go. So you hit upon this a moment ago with the whole franchising thing of how to actually create this template and create a strict thing where where the people that are talking to your customers are very educated and they're giving the right information and asking the right questions. So how have you done that with the people that are at your current stores and how have you done that with the people that are on the other end of the chat? When somebody files in to ask these questions, Tim: Yeah, so. Joe: How do you get something like when is somebody OK? You're ready to take a call, you're ready to be on the chat, you're ready to to advise a customer in the store, like, what's that process? Tim: Yeah, Joe: And you don't Tim: So. Joe: Have to go too deep. I just Tim: No, Joe: I Tim: No, Joe: But Tim: That. Joe: I'm sure somebody is going to say, like, hey, Tim, super educated on this. So every time I talk, like I just said, you know what I call him on the chat, I want him, you Tim: Right. Joe: Know. So Tim: Right. Joe: How to how do you duplicate Tim so that everyone that's coming in on the chat or walking in the store says this is just a clone of Tim like he may. He's already run them through the ringer, you know? Tim: Yeah, that's so the three month curriculum that we created is our pride and joy. I'm so thankful for that. It was brutal to create. So I created one hundred videos, having a five minute conversation where I'm explaining different parts of the world and explaining brands and what to look for and how to explain it. And then we'll go through they'll have to pass quizzes and tests based on each module. So there's nine different modules to this curriculum. They have to go through trainings with specific companies. They have to do a number of roleplaying activities with our managers where they pretend to be the customer Joe: Mm Tim: And Joe: Hmm. Tim: Coming in, hey, I'm looking for some CBDs. What do you got? And so they get tested there and they have to get these certifications from each of these brands, so they have to pass it. So there's one guy who got to the end and he is like, OK, dude, we got to rewind because you're not retaining this stuff. So either you did the last minute cramming for this quiz the night before. And like I didn't I did that in high school. Joe: Ok. Tim: And then you don't retain it, right. Joe: Yeah. Tim: So do you really care about this or not? So he had to start over. He had to go through it again. So it's a team. We have a leadership team of five. And so we have these nine modules, the quizzes, the tests. They have to pass them. They have to do the role playing. And then the leadership team of five will say, OK, this person's ready or they're really not ready. And there's still a couple of parts of our team where we're like, OK, where they can be a wellness consultant in the store, but we don't think they're ready to be on live chat. So then we'll wait maybe six months until they have a little bit more experience, because where our team learns the most is from the customers coming in asking the questions and they don't know the answers of how to treat colitis Joe: Mm Tim: With Joe: Hmm. Tim: Whatever. So then they have to go find out to get back to that customer and then they learn something. So right now, I'm proud to say our live chat feature on our website, if you go to find your other place, dotcom lower, right. You get that little live chat bubble, the seven different consultants that you might run into over there are, I wouldn't say clones of Tim because I think they're smarter than me, but they are really well equipped and able to match, kind of hit the mark of where they need to be. And they all know and are passionate enough about helping people to not. One of the first things that I'll tell them is, dude, never bullshit. Joe: Yeah, yeah. Tim: That's a real thing. And I came from a I won't say anything negative where it's just more about getting the sale, about getting that commission. And and that's part of why we don't do commissions. So it's a fun process for intense. Joe: Well, that's great, man. Yeah, so I want to respect your time. We're down to the wire. I want to make sure I didn't miss anything that you want to talk about. So you have four stores in Wisconsin. Tim: Madison, Joe: Correct. Tim: Wisconsin, the. Joe: Ok, and you have the website Tim: Find your healthy place, Dotcom. Joe: Buying your healthy place, Dotcom. Anything else that I missed that is important that we talk about? Tim: You know, dude, I mean, as I was thinking about this program and your followers, like what your mission is, you're trying to encourage entrepreneurs, trying to encourage people to be thankful for life. You don't Joe: Mm Tim: Take Joe: Hmm. Tim: To treat life like the gift it is, you Joe: Yep. Tim: Know? So I did want to offer your followers a coupon code. If they don't have you know, if you have a health food store in your own home town, that's great sport. Those guys, if you have somebody on your team, that's awesome. That's my main passion. And if you need a resource that you can trust, if you go to find your healthy place dotcom and you get something type in coupon code, Castelo, and that'll give 30 percent off the full price on anything on our whole website, we have thousands of products. So anything from V12 to something more intense. And regardless if you buy something or not, use that live chat feature to ask questions. You know, I've had people call my cell phone bill. Hey, Jim, you know, I'm in Wholefoods right now and I'm looking at three different multivitamins. Like which one do you think I should get? You know, and I get to tell them and it's fun and you can share the love. And so use that live chat feature as a resource, because more than ever, dude, we need natural alternatives. We need some education we at least need to know about, like Joel and your Joe: Yeah, Tim: Life partner. Dude, Joe: Yeah. Tim: What if she didn't have that naturopathic doctor that gave her some natural supplements through one of the most intensive crisis's that she ever faced in her life? Like, you know, in your gut that that helped her in a dramatic way because you watched her do P ninety three, the cancer experience. Joe: Yeah. Tim: I mean, that's a miracle, dude. And it took somebody reaching out and it took a resource being willing to respond to create that miracle, you know. And so that's what I want for people. Joe: Yeah, it's I can't stress it enough that Tim: Right. Joe: What I saw before my very eyes every single Tim: Right. Joe: Day and it would and then I see people that are going through cancer of some type and they're only being treated, Tim: As Joe: You know, Tim: A medical doctor, yeah. Joe: And they're their body is just being crushed. Tim: Yes. Joe: And there's and there's nothing, no nothing helping to offset the chemicals and all of the harshness Tim: Know. Joe: Of that treatment. And so. Tim: Right, and let me say, you know, you saw it with somebody you loved very much, I saw it with my mom when I was five or six. And since then, I'm getting goosebumps. I have seen it for thousands of people through the last 11 years that the healthy place has been a company, thousands of people, not always cancer, but but we're talking depression, chronic pain, Crohn's disease, asthma, like people suffering like megacorp. There's so much suffering going on Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: In the world and there is natural alternatives that people literally don't know about. They have nobody in their world telling them. So they just listen to whatever mainstream media or their medical doctor Joe: Yeah. Tim: Or their pharmacist. And there's a lot of good people with good intent in those areas. It's just there's not the voice of natural alternatives. So we need to know about this stuff. We've got to get the word out. Joe: Yeah, it's great, man, I love what you're doing, and this Tim: Think. Joe: Was exciting for me and and I think I actually have your personal email, so I'm just going Tim: That's Joe: To I'm Tim: Awesome. Joe: Going to go I'm going to go ten. I need Tim: You Joe: More Tim: Should. Joe: Energy, Tim. I think I think I have inflammation. And I'm going Tim: Yeah, Joe: To be like. Tim: I know you should, and if anyone's listening to and they because sometimes, you know, they just have a trust factor or whatever, Tim at Find Your Healthy Place Dotcom. I am happy to take emails. This what I get to do all day, dude, and it's just fun. It's so rewarding. You just get to point people in the right direction and help them out. So I love it. Joe: I wish you all the luck in the world, this is a Tim: Thank you. Joe: This is a great thing that you're doing. It's nice to have somebody who is, like you said, it's it's Soulsby before sales. It's a great it's a great way to do it. And I think Tim: Thank Joe: You'll be Tim: You. Joe: Rewarded continually be rewarded for doing Tim: Thank Joe: It that Tim: You. Joe: Way. I'll put everything in the show notes. Thank you for the coupon for the listeners Tim: Now. Joe: And I'll make sure I have all the correct links. So find your healthy place. Dotcom is the website. The company's name is the Healthy Place for locations in Madison, Wisconsin. You eventually might franchise someday, Tim: Yes, Joe: But Tim: And people on Facebook, you know, Joe: Yeah. Tim: The healthy people on Facebook, my wife's a genius as far as really caring for our community there. So you'll find a lot of good content and Instagram as well. So thank you, dear. This Joe: Yeah, Tim: Is. Joe: Tim, thanks so much, man, I really appreciate your time today and thanks for all the insight and I really do wish you the best of luck. Tim: Any time, brother, and wish the same to you. Joe: Thank you, Matt. Tim: I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I want to thank you for listening to my podcast. I know you have many options to listen to various podcasts, and I'm honored that you chose to listen to mine. I would love it if you were to rate my podcast Five Stars and write a nice review. It really helps to bring up the rankings of the podcast. Other listeners, once again, thank you so much for listening to the Joe Costello show. I appreciate you very much.  

James: Okay. So let's get started.  Hey audience, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth Podcast. Today, we have Tim Bratz from Legacy Wealth Holdings. Tim is a multi-family syndicator/sponsor who owns almost 3200 units almost valued at 250 million dollars in value. Hey Tim, welcome to the show. Tim: James, I appreciate you having me, buddy, thank you.  James: Absolutely. Happy to have you here. I've been trying to get you on the show for some time and we have been playing tag on the appointments. That's good. So, can you tell me which market are you focusing on right now?  Tim: I'm actually in six different markets, six different states. I'm pretty heavy in the Southeast. Majority of my property, about 70% of my properties are in South Carolina and Georgia, but I'm also in Ohio which is where I live. And then I'm also in Texas, Oklahoma and I got a couple of vacation rentals down in Florida as well. James: Okay. Without going too much into detail just quickly, how did you start? And then how did you scale to 3,200 units within how many years?  Tim: Yeah. Well, I mean, I was going through college when the last market cycle was going gangbusters. So 03 to 07, I'm going through college, everybody said if you wanna make money get involved in real estate. I ended up moving out to New York City because my brother was living out there. And I became a commercial real estate agent for businesses. You know, so I broker leases and I brokered a lease that was 400 square feet in Manhattan. It was $10,000 a month and so I was like the wrong side of the coin. I need to be owning real estate not brokering it. So I got into a lot of the residential stuff. I think a lot of investors get into real estate because of the lure of passive income and residual income, but then many of us get stuck doing this transactional stuff of flipping houses and wholesaling. And I went through that same phase, you know, I thought I had to stockpile my own cash. I didn't understand that you could syndicate, that you could raise private money and bring in equity partners and how your sponsors to then cosign on loans. I didn't know that that was possible.  So I went through the whole residential side of things and bought my first apartment building the end of 2012. So just like seven years ago. It was a little eighth unit building and I fixed it all up, put tenants in place and I was like man, I'm making better returns on this than I am flipping houses and it's way less headaches. And so I bought another eight-unit and kind of built up a portfolio about 150 units with some partners.           That partnership ended up going bad a few years later. In 2015, I ended up liquidating everything and then just going back out on my own. And so I started on my own and just kind of partnered up with a couple of people that they just started raising money for different projects and I partnered up with good operators and bring money to those projects and help sponsor those loans or I started buying my own properties here locally in Cleveland. And over the past four years, pretty much in August of 2015, I started buying my own stuff. So it's been right at four years now. I built up a little over 3200 units, 3207 units as of today, about 251 million dollars worth of property value and my model is based on the residential realm, actually. I buy properties and I got to be all in for 65% of the stabilized value because that's what the model was. I never read a book. I never went to a seminar before. I just kind of developed it myself and I started buying properties, apartment buildings, the exact same way.  So I have to be able to buy it, renovate it, be all in for 65% of that stabilized value. And so a lot of the buildings that I buy, you know, I'm into a building that's worth 10 million dollars for about six-six and a half million dollars. So on the 250 million dollars worth of property, I only owe to lenders and my equity investors, it's like right at 150 million dollars. So we have a lot of equity in our properties too.  James: Got it. Got it. So it's very interesting you bring up that 65% because that's the exact number that I had when I was doing my single-family for zero money down. So I counted if I get at 65% ARV, which is after repair value, you should be able to do a second load, which is I call it as a double closing of a loan. I have two loans; one loan is like you do like a short term loan and at 65%, you buy it, you take a rehab loan and then you flip it to the long term loan. Tim: Yes. That's my entire model. So I don't traditionally syndicate, I buy distressed assets. I'm bigger than some of the smaller investors but not quite a hedge fund or a Reit and I'm willing to get my hands dirty, I'm willing to actually do the work. So I take on a little bit more distressed type properties. I only buy in A and B Class areas, but the properties are typically C-Class type properties that need physical improvements, better management. Like really not just value-add but like a total repositioning a lot of times. We're remarketing, rebranding, all that. And so, we come in and we fix it all up and because we force appreciation because we can make it happen and really create the appreciation versus speculating on appreciation and hoping values go up over the next five years, we're able to create a lot of equity in that first 12 months and then we're able to turn around and refinance and cash out our investors.  So instead of selling, I just refinance at like a 70% loan to value that gives me enough money to then, pay off my bridge loan. Or that short-term construction loan is and it helps me pay off my investors and to me, it's more predictable. It's more predictable to know where interest rates and where the economy is going to be 12 months from now or 18 months from now than it is like maybe 5 or 7 years from now. Five or seven years from now, we could have a very different economy, very different political circumstances; could have three different presidents in the next five years, right? So we just don't know.  And for me, I like the predictability of buying at a wholesale price, creating an appreciation and then cashing out my investors. Now it's you know for lack of a better term house money in play, right? So now we can let the property ride and we can hit sit on it. It doesn't matter what happens to the economy for the next 10 years, I have a long-term, long amortization schedule fixed interest rate loan, non-recourse loan in place; where the market can go up it can go down, I still have tenants in place paying the debt service, paying the operating expenses, and putting cash in my pocket and I could ride this thing out because I don't owe any of my investors any more cash.  James: Got it. Got it. So yeah, that's exactly the deep value add, that's how I position it where you buy it at really good value; very, very low level.  You really put all your effort to push up the first appreciation and then you go and refi in 12 to 18 months, I guess right? Tim: And we built some new construction stuff too, down in the Southeast. We built some townhouses. Like we'll do new construction, it'll be like an A or B plus kind of an area but it's not luxury. We do only workforce type housing so we can build townhouses for about $85,000 per unit, 80 to 90,000 per unit and they'll rent for about 1,300 bucks a month for us. And so that allows us to get the values where we need it to then refinance and do the exact same thing just for new construction. So we do a little bit of that and more repositioning of existing assets though. James:  Yeah, very interesting. I really like the model. I was doing it like two-three years ago. I mean, for me, I got worried about the market and I start, not looking for deep value add and also deep value add is harder to find. Even though you find it, what happened the sellers are basically taking the value by pushing up the price on the deep value add and because of that, it's not a deep value add anymore. Tim: Right. I don't pay a seller for the value that I'm going to bring to the property, right? So there are some sellers that you know, they're like, oh, well, this could be worth this much. Yeah, but I have to create that value. You're not creating that value. So we find we're a lot of times direct to seller, off-market type property. You know, we're big enough now, especially in Georgia and South Carolina, we have the broker relationships where we're one of the top five buyers in town and you get those deals before they actually hit the market. But in a lot of other markets, I'm not, you know, the biggest buyer in town so I have to go off-market, direct to seller, kind of stuff. And we get a lot of our properties from Mom and Pops who have owned it for 20 30 years or inherited the property. They just didn't put any more money back into it. You know, the total debt on the property is very low if at all and they just don't want to put any more money into it. They don't want to do the work so we buy it from them. Or I buy a lot from smart entrepreneurs, really sharp people who make a lot of money in their traditional business and they just put their money in real estate and then they didn't have a joint venture partner. They never got educated. They don't know how to manage a management company or interview a management company and they just get abused in the business. So they're like I'm making too much money in my traditional business, this thing is going to sink me. Let me just fire sale this apartment building. So that's where we buy most of our properties from. And then again: we reposition it, we do the stuff that that hedge funds aren't willing to do, and we're qualified enough to take down a 200 unit building that needs a pretty heavy value-add. I do it that way. But like you said though, James, I'm starting to buy a little bit more stabilized assets, more like 85-90 percent occupied of just a little bit of tweaks in the common areas and amenities and then bumping up some rents. We're doing a little bit more of that right now just because of where we are in the market cycle.  James: Yeah, correct. But you gave a lot of details that I want to go a bit more detail into that. So you said you look for deals that are in class A and B, but more distress. And I mean you're basically shrinking your funnel as well because you're going for that... Tim:  Niche gets rich, right? James: Exactly. [11:02crosstalk] Tim: People say hey real estate's mine age. Now real estate's an industry, right? Apartments aren't even initial. You need to figure out what you are really, really good at. And one of the things that I'm really good at is 80 units to 100 units that are distress. It's bigger, it's too distressed for the small guys to get a loan on it because they don't have the background or the resume to go and take down that kind of stuff and the qualifications do that because they haven't done it before. It's a big project, big value add and at the same time, it's too distressed for the hedge funds because they just want to park money and let it sit, let it ride, and let it cash flow from day one. So this is my niche. It's A and B Class areas; good areas, desirable areas, just distressed kind of properties and we're able to get in there and we have all the financing, the relationships are all in place. We could raise the money pretty easily because we can cycle our money every 12 to 18 months. I don't have to wait five years to get my investors their money out; I can cycle at every 12 to 18 months. So as soon as I pay him back guess what they say, let's go do another one. And then they're involved in you know, three deals in five years versus one deal in five years and it makes my life easier because I don't have to go and raise money from new people all the time. James: Got it. Got it. That's a really good model. So that's the investors after you cash out when you pay them back, do they stay in the deal as well? Tim: Yep. So mine's a little bit different than traditional syndication. Usually me and my joint venture boots-on-the-ground partners, we keep 70 to 80% of the equity in the deal and then we pay a pref, a fixed pref to our investors regardless of the properties performance. So even if it's not cash flowing it's predictable because I know that if I'm borrowing 2 million bucks, I'm paying, let's say, 10% pref, I'm going to pay $200,000. That's just a cost of the deal. I got roofs, I got flooring, I got paint, I got cost of capital; it's an extra $200,000.  So I build that into my model and then I can make those payments to them. They feel more confident, more comfortable because now they have a predictable return on their investment. Then I refinance, they get all their money back off the table and then they still maintain 20-30% ownership without any money invested and we're able to do that again and again and again. And so, you know with traditional syndicators if I try raising money from somebody who's used to traditional syndication, they're like, why would I ever do that? Well, you get a predictable return and secondly, you get 30% ownership.  But if all your money is in three different deals, it's actually 90% ownership because 30% 30% 30%. And so overall, they're actually ahead of what they would do in traditional syndication where they might get 70 or 80% of the equity in one deal. So, it actually works out better for the investors, works out better for me but it's a lot of work on my part. We spend a lot of money.  Sometimes we spend a lot of money on advertising in new markets until we have those relationships built up and then, in order to find those off-market direct to seller deals and it's a lot of work. Like my business partner down in Georgia that I own a bunch of property with, he goes and sleeps at the properties for three nights a week. He spends four full days there, sleeps in a B-class apartment, you know, on a blow-up mattress, the guy is worth 25 million bucks. And then his brother who's our other partner is worth another 25 million and they're sleeping at the properties, doing the work, kicking the tables, making sure construction ends up on time, on budget and that's what you need to do man. I see a lot of people who are trying to be this puppet master and they're not willing to actually do the work of taking ownership over this thing. They just want to go and syndicate and then go back off to whatever they're doing. And to me, like there's something to be said about just having old school diligence and work mentality and what you can get done if you're willing to do that kind of stuff. James: Yeah, real estate is very, very powerful; especially commercial real estate where you can force appreciate. And especially if you are going to get the majority of the equity in the deal, why not I sleep, right?  In 12 months, 70 to 80% of this deal is going to be mine. Why not work hard, I'm with you. Tim: It's a season of your life. If you're putting your head down for a year or 18 months, but then you can generate millions of dollars of equity, why not do that? And so yeah, that's kind of the mentality that we take.  James: Correct. Yeah, it's very powerful to create wealth and I think the investors appreciate that as well because now you're able to give them back their money and all that. But your model is assuming that you are able to refi into a long term loan in the 12 to 18 months, right? So what happened if that model breaks? Tim: Yep, absolutely. So that's the inherent risk with our model is what happens if rates change, what happens? If banking tightens up, what does that all look like? So a couple of things. One, I don't think rates are going to change as much in 12 or 18 months as they would maybe in five or seven years. So to me, we underwrite the deal - like right now, I just closed on 500 units. I got 2 buildings, around 250 units each last month and I got a 3.83 and a 3.88 interest rate. Even right now, rates went up back; they're hovering around for four and a quarter right now for stabilized assets. We're underwriting the deals with 4.75 to five percent interest rate on the back end for a stabilized property. So we're taking on some of that, some of that, we're underwriting it for that. We also underwrite our rents very, very conservatively and we're at such a low basis in the property, usually around 60% of what that stabilized value is, we have options. So Fannie and Freddie are tightening up big time right now. That's okay because we're at such a low basis that we can still go over to CMBS - commercial mortgage-backed security - or a life insurance company and even though they offer a lower loan to value, I'm okay with that because I'm at a low enough basis. I can still cash out my investors.  So worst-case scenario, my investors still get their money back and we have a lower LTV loan. So maybe there's not some refi proceeds or anything like that that we can take off the table but at the end of the day, they're going to have more equity, you know, their equities gonna be worth more in the property and the cash flow is going to be more on a recurring basis for that. And the other thing is even when banks stopped lending to people in 2009-2010, guess what? They were still lending to somebody and it was the people with big balance sheets, with stabilized portfolios. And I have a big enough balance sheet and stable enough portfolio. I'll be able to get refinanced regardless of what happens in the next 12 to 18 months so I'm not that concerned about it. And again, because our basis is so low, we have such high cash flow on these properties. I have different options and have a good team of mortgage brokers. Who even if I had a slap another, you know three-year loan on there, even if it was at 6% interest rate or six and a half percent interest rate, I can still cash flow;  it's enough. It covers my operating expenses, it covers my debt service, still puts cash flow in the bank. You know, it's a crappy conversation that I have to have with my equity investors, but they keep on making ten percent on their money so they're happy.           You know, the worst-case scenario is they get their money back in 48 months; then, you know it is what it is. So I've taken a look at all the downside. I've talked to people with billion dollar portfolios and said, hey poke holes in my model. And that's the inherent risk is what if you can't refinance? So that's one of the things. The deals that I just closed last month, they were already in that 85-90 percent occupancy range. Like right at 90-91, I think is what they were. And so we got a Fannie Mae loan actually on it. That's a construction loan that we'll be able to put a supplemental debt on it. So, it's already a long term loan, 30-year amortization, couple years of interest only. And then, whenever we create the appreciation, 12 months 18 months from now, we'll be able to put supplemental debt, which is kind of like a second mortgage almost but through the same lender, so they're cool with it. And so the only real risk I'm taking is the interest rate on that portion of the debt. I owe 17 million dollar mortgage on it right now. And then the other will be about another 7 million dollars. So the only real rate risk is I'll get home at three point eight percent on 17 million dollars, even if the other 7 million goes a 5%, my blended cost of capital still four and a quarter or maybe a little less. So, you know, that's another way that we're reducing that ongoing risk.  James: It's very interesting. Now you're convincing me to do deep value add again. So because it's just so hard to mess up. Tim: I mean, the construction is where it all comes down to. I mean, if you stay on time and on budget, you're in good shape. But if you don't have a good construction partner like you can really get burn bad in the deep value add stuff. So you've got to understand what your team looks like, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. And for me, we're okay with it. We're pretty good at it and we have a really good construction team.  My partner in Georgia, man, I put him toe-to-toe against anybody in the country from a construction standpoint. He can build new construction, he can renovate existing units. And because he has the mentality of 'let me go and sleep at the property' three nights a week, away from his family, away from his five kids, you know, he's willing to take that on because it's again a season of his life. Like that's kind of partners that I like to partner up with. James: Yeah. Hustlers, they will go really far in life and that's what we need. It's very interesting. So I mean, is there any deal that you find that you didn't do? That you think you should have done and after you passed on it, you realized, ah, should have done that deal? Is there a deal that you look at...  Tim: That's a good question.  Let me think on this. We try to kill deals. I try to kill every deal that comes across my plate, especially right now. I try to look for every reason to walk away from every deal that comes across my desk. If I cannot kill the deal then I know it's a good deal. And so, you know, as soon as you're like, 'hey, well, I think I can scale back construction and make it work', wrong idea, wrong strategy. Because the last thing you want to scale back is the construction of the value-add process. Because then your rents aren't going to hit where you expect them to hit because you're not able to attract better tenants or higher quality tenants and they don't see the value that you're adding to the property. At the end of the day, like people like, 'oh, I think we can make this one work.' No. The only way you can make it work is if you go back to the seller and negotiate a lower purchase price because that's the only variable in this equation. You know, what rents are going to be is what rents are going to be; what the construction budget is, is what the construction budget is. The only variable here is the purchase price. And you know, you make your money on the buy side. So are there deals that I passed up on that I should have moved on? Maybe but for me, man, I don't have much of a risk tolerance. I only buy stuff that I know that is very predictable to me. That's why I don't play the stock market. I can't control if you know Volkswagen -  I can't control if Elon Musk smokes a joint on public television and the stock drops by 15%; you know, I can't control that. I like being able to control real estate and having very predictable returns for me and my investors. And sometimes it's a gut check, you know. Even if everything looks good on paper, but my gut doesn't feel good about it, I'll say no to a deal. It's just that I've seen enough deals go south. And as quickly as we can build our net worth, being in commercial real estate, one bad deal can take out your legs and wipe you out totally. So I'm just not willing to take on that risk, especially when it takes so much work in order to get to where we are.  James: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I want to touch on your gut check thing because I know numbers don't lie and we are numbers guys and when underwriting, we want to make sure things work on paper and all that. But I've walked out of a deal because everything works very well and the numbers look good, but there is something wrong in that deal that I didn't discover and I've walked out from that kind of deal as well. And that's very important. I mean, real estate is not only science where everybody says a numbers game and people that are good in numbers will do it but there's a lot of odd to it as well where it's just something wrong somewhere and it comes from experience. Tim:  That's the only way you get that, from experience and it's usually personnel kind of things that make me walk from a deal. I'm just not comfortable with that joint venture partner, with that management company or with whatever the seller is saying. You can kind of see through the lines once in a while, whatever that is. Yeah, I mean my model is I'm really good at raising money. I'm really good at sourcing deals. We're pretty good at creating - like we can handle a lot of the back office type stuff.  I'm back in Cleveland, Ohio now, is where I live, we can handle a lot of the management side of things; collecting of rents, work orders, telecommunication; all that kind of stuff, all the administrative side. From here in Cleveland, we just need a local boots-on-the-ground partner and some local property managers, maintenance personnel, and I always have a joint venture partner locally. And so if that joint venture partner isn't strong enough, then usually I'll walk away from the deal. Because man, I think it's important to have somebody with vested interest, with equitable interest in the deal; who's local to the property, who can go put their eyes on it a couple of times a month; to keep everybody honest, to keep the management company honest, to keep the local property manager, maintenance personnel, leasing agents and just come in and kick the tables once a month and just let people know that we're paying attention. Because if you don't pay attention, then they take advantage of you.  James: Yeah, it's hard work. I mean, I know exactly how you feel in terms of how much hustle and how much detail and how much you have to be on top of the property managers because it's not their baby, it's your baby. And there's so much of details that if you don't ask them, they're just going to slack off right?  Tim: Yes.   James: They are paid differently from what we have paid for and we are the owners and it's just completely different ownership level, right? So that's very interesting. Is there any deal that you think after you bought it didn't match from what you thought in the beginning. You thought this is how I'm going to execute it but once you buy, it's like, oh, it's completely different from what I thought and how did you overcome it? Tim: Yeah, I mean every deal is a learning experience and you to get punched in the gut enough times and eventually you learn. Fortunately, you know when I was growing my portfolio, I bought my first building in 2012 and I bought an eight-unit building for $30,000. So I'm in Cleveland, Ohio buying units for $4,000 a unit. I put another, I don't know, 50 grand into it. So I'm all in for $10,000 a unit. And it's hard to lose. And so in 2012 2013 2014 as I'm growing my portfolio, while I'm going through these learning curves, the market is getting better and that was able to absorb a lot of my screw-ups early on. So I still made money on every single deal that I did even though I was learning on a lot of these things. There's only one building, a 44 unit building, that I bought about 2-3 years ago maybe that I've lost money on. It was one of those things, hey, I saw the leases, I saw the rent roll. It was 80% occupied and I bought it from a guy that I know, somebody that I actually know. And so, I bought 44 units and he's like, "Yeah, man, 80% occupancy." "Great, man. I'm going to come in, I'm going to renovate the last whatever 9 units and turn those over. I got a local team." He was out of state.  "So like my team can come in clean it all up clean up the common areas. I think I can make $300,000 on this thing in the next 12 months pretty easily and it'll cash flow a little bit in the meantime." So I buy it and I find out it's only 25% economically occupied. So there are 35 tenants or something in place and only 11 of them are actually paying rent. And so I learned my lesson there, you know. It's not about occupancy, it's about collections.  And this is a buddy of mine. This is somebody I've known for many years and grabbed dinner with him, his wife, my wife and not a lot of times but a few times and close enough where I call him a buddy. And all of a sudden, he sells me a building, tells me it's 80% occupied, doesn't tell me it's only collecting 25%. And all of a sudden, I had to kick out 24 tenants and turn over 24 additional units.  So imagine what that cost does now to the $300,000 I thought I was going to make? And this was one of the only times I brought an investor in and he wanted 50/50 of the deal: "Let me bring the money, you do the deal."  "Okay, cool."  And I'm stroking a check for about 35 40 thousand dollars when it was all said and done. And I could have gone to that investor and said, "Hey, man, I need 20 grand from you. I'm putting up 20 grand of my money. We're selling this thing. It's a pain in the butt. We're gonna lose money on it. But, you know, we gotta get rid of it. And that's part of the deal."  Instead, I stroked the entire check, gave him 100% of his money back and because he didn't make a return, I gave him equity in another deal of mine, without him having to put up any money just to kind of soften that blow. And so I think when you do the right thing by your investors word spreads, you know, he says great things about me, he wants to invest in more deals with me and stuff now. It is, do the right thing knowing that there's always another deal. There's always another opportunity.  That one, we could have held on to the property long-term and let it cash flow. That's a cool thing about buying apartment buildings. You can really screw up and if you had to, you can hold on to it, manage it, let it cash flow for the next 10 years and eventually, you'll actually make money on these things even with that big of a screw-up. But for me and where my long-term vision is and my team and everything else, it was just more of a C-Class type property. It took up too much management and too many headaches. It wasn't big enough. We couldn't really scale it. So we made just a business decision to sell it and to eat that loss. But it's the only building I ever really ever lost money on. Now we've gone through pretty much everything and we've gotten kicked in the crotch enough times where we know what to look for across every building. Like it's very hard to pull the wool over our eyes unless it's like grossly fraudulent on the sellers part.  Another big thing that I didn't know early on that I wish I should have done that's always a consistent issue with every building we've ever bought is like the plumbing and the drain tiles leaving the building. It's always one of those unknowns. So now, we spend three to five thousand dollars to scope every single drain line, in every building that we put under contract to ensure that there's not going to be this massive plumbing bill, unexpected plumbing bill, once we buy the property. So that's one of the things that's been a big deal.           And then just verifying collections. Like those two things from a financial due diligence and a physical due diligence perspective like those two things that we've dialed in now and we always did everything else. We always inspected the rooms in every unit, the electrical panels. One of the other things that I didn't do early on that I do now, we've done for the many years now, is I used to only walk the vacant units and the common areas and the mechanical rooms. And then all of a sudden, you realize that they're not showing you all the vacant units. There are other vacant units that they're telling you that they're occupied, they just didn't want you to see them. And like I bought buildings where tenants were turning on and off their faucet with a wrench because there's no actual faucet. So you don't realize a lot of that stuff early on when you're a dumb kid. But I've been through all man. I've been everything. We walk every single unit on a 500 unit apartment building. We will walk every single unit and we'll put a report together on every single unit. It's a one-page, just kind of condition report. We'll take 30 pictures of every single unit. We put it all into like a Google Drive or Dropbox folder. In that way, we have all the information we could ever need on this property. We're not relying on our memory to look up all that stuff. It's all there. Our contractors can see it during the entire due diligence period, all that stuff. And so I think everything's a learning curve. I think you learn from everything. The thing in this business though is like if you can get past all those learning curves, if you can get past some of those losses and some of those getting punched in the stomach, eventually, you're process is so dialed in.  Like they can't pull the wool over your eyes that you cannot lose on deals. And that's why we walk away from a lot of deals that we do because they're waiting for somebody who's an idiot who doesn't know what they're doing to come in and buy their property and overpay for it or not do the due diligence that they're supposed to be doing and all these other things. But eventually, you know what you're doing enough, where your risk is so minimized because you've done all the due diligence on these things, it's a very predictable business at the end of the day. Like you said, it's all about numbers, right? James: Yeah, I mean, it's crazy nowadays, right? I mean with the market being as hot as it is right now, with so many people looking for deals and so many bidding war. So nowadays, the smarter thing that a lot of brokers and sellers are doing, they say day one hard money. Now, they lock you in. So you go into a bidding war, you pay this huge amount of hard money and sometimes they don't even give you early access., So now you're locked in. You can find a thousand and one things and yet we are locked in. Tim: No, I don't do that stuff. I don't play that game. You don't need to if your off-market direct to seller. If you're going through brokers, they're going to do that to you, you know. And there are some people who have crazy money and they're willing to risk that; I'm not willing to risk any of that stuff. A lot of people, they spend a lot of time on ROI - return on investment. I spend a lot of time on return on ROI - return of investment, you know, and making sure I get all my money back. I never ever want to risk principal.   I mean that deal, that's just too risky of a deal. If they want hard earnest money from day one and I haven't already walked the entire property, I'm not interested in doing it. I think once you get to a point where if you're partnered up with a great sponsor or you are a great sponsor yourself and you have the business acumen that like you have James or that I have like I'm able to posture up with these sellers now and kind of say, "Hey. Yeah, no problem. You can go steal somebody's earnest money. That's okay. You can go ahead and do that. But they're not gonna be able to close on this deal because you're lying about the condition of the property or the financials whatever. Or if you're willing to actually sell it to me, give me my opportunity to do my due diligence and shoot straight with me on everything, I promise you, I'm more capable of closing than any of the other people that you're getting bids from right now or you're getting offers from right now."  And so I've been able to kind of build up my credibility in that way where sellers are willing to take less money and offer me better terms than they would maybe with somebody else because they know that I can close on the property. They don't want to get dragged through the mud.  James: Correct. Yeah, this is very interesting, nowadays, the way the market is being played. They're putting all these handcuffs of hard money, day one. And there's another handcuffed where they said you must do lending with our own in-house lending. So that's another handcuff. There are two or three handcuffs that brokers are putting on sellers. And the third subtle handcuff that they do; nowadays, when they close, they send out an email saying that, oh, this buyer paid day one, you know huge amount of money $500,000. They're telling everybody else. Tim: They're trying to set that expectation.  James: If you want to come and buy deals nowadays, you better be ready. So many handcuffs are being put on buyers. But I think a lot of sellers, you know, if they want to work with a good buyer, people who want to really do business, they don't know want to just make the money on earnest money and waste a lot of time getting people to walk through all their units and getting their stuff all being nervous.  So just find a guy who's willing to do it and who is the true buyer. Who knows what he's doing and can close.  Tim: The good brokers with long-term visions and long-term goals, know how to find quality buyers and that's better than just anybody who raises their hand with earnest money, you know. In every hot market, there are people who are short-sighted, who got into real estate real quick just because they wanted to get rich quick, kind of a thing. And they'd rather just do it that way and then anybody who raises their hand, they're willing to go with and those aren't the brokers you want to work with. You want to work with the people who have been around the block a few times, who understand what a good buyer looks like, can build those ongoing relationships. Because as soon as the market shifts, if things cool off, it's going to clean out all the unqualified buyers and unqualified brokers as well. James: Correct. So, let's go to a bit more personal side of things. So what I like about you is you're very, very positive. So you like to look at life very positively and you know, it's hard to do because sometimes you always have something negative that comes in. So do you want to explain about in this business, yeah, you always want to say something negative that you always want to talk about but how do you maintain that positivity?  Tim: Yeah, I mean, you know, I told you the story when we met up a couple of weeks ago or a month ago. I mean, just less than 90 days ago, I was out golfing and I got rocketed to the face with a golf ball, 100 miles an hour from about 30 yards away. It shattered my upper maxilla bone. It knocked out four of my front teeth and shredded my gums. And my lip opened and I was bleeding like crazy. I look down. I'm like, oh, I feel my teeth dangling from my gums and I look down at the ground and I kind of took a knee to make sure I didn't pass out. I looked down at the grass, I'm like, "Man, this grass is really well-manicured; like beautiful grass here, on this golf course."  And I'm like, How the hell am I able to keep up such a positive attitude in this?" You know, I'm thinking about my thoughts. I'm very reflective in that regard. And I was like, "Well, here's why I can see it positive because I got hit my mouth and not in my eyeball or my temple. I could be blind or dead if this thing was an inch higher than where it was."           And so, man, I don't know if it's the law of attraction. You can call it God, you can call it, you know the universe and call it whatever but I think when you put the positivity out, it comes full circle. It's kind of like you reap what you sow kind of a thing and I sow seeds of positivity. And so, I jump in the golf cart and I get taken back to the clubhouse. You know, who's dining in the clubhouse? There are two dentists and an ER nurse having dinner in the clubhouse. They put me in there. They look at my teeth. They drop what they're doing. They take me to their dental office, 15 minutes down the road. They stitched me all up. They put my teeth back in and I'm able to save my teeth and 90 days later, you couldn't even tell that this whole thing happened. Like I'm still going through some cosmetic stuff, but overall like it was a terrible situation, but I think because I was positive it all just kind of came to fruition.  So, you know, one of the things I've always practiced is not saying I have to do something but saying I get to do something. When I go out to dinner with a bunch of my friends and I pick up the tab, they're like, "Dude, you don't have to do that." " No, I don't have to do it but I get to."  The reason that I do what I do is so that I can help people out and I can pay it forward. "Oh, hey, you don't have to cover that bill. You don't have to do this"  'No, but I get to."           I had to eat soup for about a month afterward, but I'm thinking you know, I'm eating a tomato bisque basil soup. I don't have to eat mud pies like people do on the other side of the earth. I don't have to walk two miles each way to go and get fresh water like people have to do on the other side of the earth and some people on this side of the earth. I get to eat soup, I get to eat something that's a bisque that has basil in it. Like are you kidding me? Like there are people who would kill to be able to eat that kind of stuff. I didn't have 14 teeth knocked out, I only had four teeth knocked out.  I think when you just compare it and you put it in that type of perspective of, man, it could have been way worse, you know, like the situation could have gone - and there are still people even with me with my teeth dangling from my mouth, being in that circumstance, I'm still in a better circumstance than a lot of other people who don't have any food, who don't have any shelter, who don't have any clothes, who don't have any support. They're being trafficked by like human trafficking like all that kind of crazy stuff.  Even when I have to go out and raise - I had to raise 7 million bucks for deals last month, and now I don't have to raise 7 million bucks. I get to raise 7 million bucks; that's a pretty awesome problem to have. And I think just putting it in that perspective of shifting your 'I-have-to' to 'I get to', will really make you more gratuitous or have more gratitude for life. James: Was it because of your parents or do you think because you just had some event in your life that you think now I have to change my time or it's just how you have been? Tim: That's a good question. My mom as always been very positive. My mom as always been, hey, you have something else to compare it to. Compare it to this, compare it to that. And I think that's probably what planted the seed of always looking at it from, "Yeah. You're right. I guess it could be way worse, right?" It could have been totally different circumstance. She always used to say, "Hey, if that's your biggest problem today, you've got a pretty good life, Tim." When I was growing up: "Ma, I don't know what I'm gonna do like my basketball just popped." "If that's your biggest problem today, it's a pretty good problem to have." You know, you're safe. You're secure, you're healthy, you have a family, you've got people who love you, you've got food with food on the table and clothes on your back and a roof over your head. Like all those kinds of things like you put in perspective. There's people dealing with a lot worse things. And yeah, I think my mom kind of rooted that into me maybe early on and it definitely stuck and man, I just show gratitude. Especially once you have kids, you know, and you realize man like all I want is their safety and their security and their healthiness and their happiness and as long as they're happy and I'm happy. That kind of a thing that's really amplified it over the past four years. I have a four-year-old and a two-year-old now. And so just putting things into in the perspective that way has been a big deal.  James: Awesome. Awesome. Is there one proud moment in your life that you think you will be remembering it for your entire life?  Tim: That's a good question, James. You've got some good questions there, buddy. James: I want you to think and answer.  Tim: Yeah, you know, I mean, is there one... James: One proud moment that at the end of your life, you're going to say that I'm really, really proud that I did that and it's going to be you know. Tim: Yeah, I don't know if it's one specific moment, but maybe just like kind of how I live my life. I try to do it on a daily basis and maybe it's not something profound. Maybe it's not something that's like one specific thing that was a catalyst. You know, I'm driving to the office today to come and talk to you and some dude cuts me off. Maybe he's got some priorities or something going on. I don't know what other people are going through, you know and for me to judge or get pissed off because somebody cut me off, why would I do that?   I'll tell you if there's a really proud moment, once my kids grow up to be decent human beings, you know, and making sure that I want to live my life as an example of what an exceptional life can look like. So I want people to be like, hey, if Tim Brax, some kid from a blue-collar family in a blue-collar town, outside of Cleveland, Ohio can build up a big portfolio and still maintain good health and still maintain positivity and still maintain great relationships with his wife and with his children, with his friends and still engage and and maybe not be balanced but have harmony in his life, like if this guy can do it, I know I could do it.  If I can inspire people, whether that be one moment in time by a Facebook post or an event that I host or being on a podcast, if I can inspire people to just be their best which is what I have on my wall here and that's not 'do' that's 'be' you know, that's like consumed that all together. It doesn't have to be the best. It would be your best. There's always gonna be somebody more capable, more resources, more whatever. You know, I don't think it's healthy to compare yourself to other people but to compare yourself to yourself and making sure that you're advancing on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis is a big deal. And so, I think I just try to make my kids proud, make my mom proud, make my wife proud, make my friends proud. Inspire other people and I try to do it more in the daily activity versus just do it one time and look at that one moment. I try to give back and try to - like I had suites to the Cavs games when LeBron was here in Cleveland. All right, and so when was that, two years year to go? Two years ago, I think. No, it was last year, I think. And so last year, I had a suite to the Cavs. I got the entire series for the first series. I figured who they're playing, but essentially when you buy a suite, you get it for the entire series, however many games they play at home and they played four games at home. And so, you know the first game I went to, I brought some business partners and was able to pay for the suite that way. And then, the second game I brought some family and the third game, I'm like, hey, I was excited to go but like I'm not as excited as I was maybe the first or second time and I'm like somebody else deserves this more than I do because I've already had this experience right? Like, how can I pay this forward?  And so I posted on social media, "I got a suite to the Cavs game. I have 18 tickets that I can give away, a couple of parking passes. It's stocked with food and drinks and whatever you guys want. Like does anybody know of a family or a few families that I can give these tickets to that maybe wouldn't have this experience on their own but really deserve because of how good of a people that they are?"  And man, like it got so much momentum and got so many shares and then the news picked it up and came and did a story on it. And I had about 5-600 applications that came through for people nominating other people to get tickets to this Cav suite. And so, it was actually really hard to break it down and essentially I found four or five families. I think five families that four tickets a piece that I gave the tickets to. And it was pretty easy to narrow it down to like 25 because I wanted somebody who had maybe faced adversity, overcame the diversity and then found a way to pay it forward; not just overcoming it but actually paying it forward and creating a difference.  So, you know, there was one girl whose sister died of an accidental overdose of drugs and now, this girl who's still alive, her younger sister goes around and speaks at different schools about opioid problems and drug problems and how to overcome that and different resources to plug into for that, you know. And so I'm like, wow, this girl, at the age of 16 years old is making an impact on the world; like she deserves some tickets. There was another gentleman who lost his daughter to a congenital heart defect. She was 3 years old, you know and loses his daughter to this congenital heart defect. And instead of like, I mean, I can only imagine how dark of a place he must have been in and he ends up opening up a nonprofit organization to help families with other kids with congenital heart defects to give them the support and help and the conversations and everything and making a massive impact up here in Cleveland, Ohio. This guy is such a good guy. I give him the tickets and he gives them to one of the people that are in his nonprofit, you know. And it's like, man, these people are just amazing individuals.           And so I found five awesome families like that, that we were able to give the tickets to and like doing stuff like that really makes me feel good. And what's even better is that there were 500 people who I was able to create a catalyst by doing this who now, 500 people are thinking in a positive way about people who make a positive impact on their life. And just that positive ripple effect that's created, I think is really, really powerful and it was really, really cool to see. James: Yeah. When I talk to you, I get very inspired because it's not about the portfolio of real estate or [49:17unintelligible]  rights, it's how you look at life and how you look at things. How you think positive and that's the most important when I look at a person. Tim: Yeah. And you do an awesome job with it, man. I mean, you realize that it's not the portfolio, it's not the money that's noble. It's what you can do with the money that's noble and utilizing it for good. I could afford a really expensive fancy exotic car and I drive a $20,000 Jeep just because I don't really care. I know that there's a bigger impact I can make by being a better steward of my Capital, putting it in more deals or paying it forward in ways like that. So I get more fulfillment from that than from maybe driving something fancy.  James: Yeah, even for me, I can't really imagine driving exotic car because, do I really need it?  Tim: At the end of the day, it'd be cool. I'd rather just go and rent one. I know I'd have buyer's remorse. I just know myself personally and I know that as soon as I bought it I'd be like, I don't really need this. And here's the thing. I like watches. I like clocks. I like taking nice vacations. I like traveling first class. I like that kind of stuff. I like making memories and traveling the world; I love all that. So that's where I get my drive from on making a lot of money. For other people, they like fancy cars, they like fancy houses; that's okay.  I got a good buddy, man, he drives a Rolls-Royce and has multiple hundred-thousand-dollar watches, you know. But I know he doesn't do it for flashed and to impress other people. He does it because when he looks down at his watch and when he gets in his car, he always sits back and he's like, "Man, I had to overcome some adversity, I had to go through some shit in order to get this watch. In order to be able to afford this car. And I've had to grow as an individual, as a person and make an impact on enough other people's lives, positively, that then the universe came back and gave me enough money to be able to afford this car and afford this watch." And so, I think it depends on perspective and that's how you look at it. Like I have nothing against people who have fancy nice things, material type things. Because I know he's one of the most giving people that I've ever met as well and so it's perspective.  James: Yeah, it's perspective. Yeah, awesome, Tim. So why don't you tell our audience how to get hold of you?  Tim: Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty active on social media; you can find me on Facebook Tim Bratz. I run my own Facebook account, you know, it's not somebody else running it. I do some education stuff on how to get involved in apartments and things but hit me up with a message there if you're looking for formal education. I give a lot of away a lot of free content, a lot of free insight and I try to provide a lot of value on social media and stuff so just connect with me on Facebook.  That's gonna be the best way and, yeah, man, James, I appreciate all the value that you give and all the value that you create and all the content that you put out there and, man, you're creating the ripple effect yourself on making a positive impact on people's lives. So appreciate you too, brother. James: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for coming on the show. It was really a very inspiring show. I'm sure for me and for my listeners and everybody's going to be enjoying it.  Tim: Appreciate it, brother. Thank you so much. James: All right. Bye.

The promise of renewable energy has always been alluring. Now that the technology has caught up to the promise, record amounts of wind and solar are coming onto the grid both in Japan and throughout the world.  But so far startups, especially Japanese startups, have been playing a very limited role in this transformation. But that's starting to change. Today we sit down with Ken Isono, founder and CEO of Shizen Energy, and we talk about what it takes to succeed as an energy startup in Japan, and since Shizen Energy is rapidly expanding globally, what it takes to succeed as a startup in the global energy markets. We talk about which renewables are working in Japan and which are not, what the real bottlenecks are, and more important, how we can fix them. It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. Show Notes Why startups struggle in the energy market How solar plants get built in Japan How to find wind projects worth building The importance of going local in a global market Why the Japanese value land rights so highly A deep dive into solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal energy in Japan How Japanese communities are funding local renewable energy Why so many of Japan's startups come from Fukuoka How Japan can transform into a free-energy economy Links from the Founder Everything you wanted to know about Shizen Energy Shizen Energy on Facebook Shizen Energy retail green energy Friend Ken on Facebook Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. It’s surprising at first, for all of the potential disruption in the energy industry, for all of the potential profits that can be made by doing things better and more efficiently in the energy industry, we don’t see that many energy startups, and as it turns out, there are good reasons for this. Generating and storing electricity at scale require skills that can’t be supplanted by new technology and innovation. Furthermore, most energy projects are long-term, low-risk medium return projects that are just not attractive to venture capital. These projects require a different kind of financing. One notable exception, however, is Japan’s Shizen Energy who is bringing a lot of renewable energy onto the grid in Japan and around the world as well, and they’re doing it as a startup. In just a minute, we’ll sit down with Ken Isono, Shizen Energy’s founder and CEO. He’ll explain how his little startup has worked with local governments and fought the incumbents to bring enough renewable energy onto the grid that Shizen Energy is not so little anymore. We’ll talk about that growth, of course, and we also take a deep dive into the current state and the future prospects of the most important renewable energy technologies in Japan. But you know, Ken tells that story much better than I can, so let’s get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey"  ] Interview  Tim: So, I’m sitting here with Ken Isono of Shizen Energy, and thanks for sitting down with me. Ken: Thanks for the chance to speak. Tim: Now, Shizen Energy, you guys are a vertically integrated renewable energy company. You guys do generation, your financing, and the retail side as well. Ken: Yeah. Tim: That’s a lot for a startup to do. Ken: We started with solar but the three co-founders used to work in wind power generation company together for five years. Tim: What made you guys decide to leave that company and start your own project? Ken: So, actually, Shizen Energy, we found this company 2011, June, so three months after Fukushima accident. Before that, there was no demand from the market, from policy in renewables, but we knew that it’s going to change. Tim: At first you were focused on large scale solar projects? Was it just the financing,

This week welcome to the show Tim Noakes.  Prof Noakes was born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1949. As a youngster, he had a keen interest in sport and attended Diocesan College in Cape Town. Following this, he studied at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and obtained an MBChB degree in 1974, an MD in 1981 and a DSc (Med) in Exercise Science in 2002. In the early 90s, Noakes teamed up with Morné du Plessis to drive the founding of the Sports Science Institute of South Africa (SSISA). The Institute was built to provide a facility that would primarily fund research in sports performance. The application of this research would provide sports personnel of all disciplines with the means to improve. Noakes and du Plessis also wanted to use it as a platform to build public interest in the country’s top sports people and build state pride. Prof Noakes has published more than 750 scientific books and articles. He has been cited more than 16 000 times in scientific literature, has an H-index of 71 and has been rated an A1 scientist by the National Research Foundation of South Africa for a second 5-year term. He has won numerous awards over the years and made himself available on many editorial boards. He has a passion for running and is still active, running half marathons when he can. He is a devoted husband, father and grandfather and now, in his retirement, is enjoying spending more time with his family. Questions we ask in this episode: You’ve been a huge voice in making changes within the dietary guidelines over the last few years, how has the response been? Can you tell us about the ‘Ocean View Project” and the results you have seen so far. What results have you seen in reversing diabetes? You’ve written a book called ‘Waterlogged’. Can you explain the concept behind this book and overhydration On the topic of longevity should we favour a specific type of exercise? And much much more. Shop: http://shop.180nutrition.com.au/ Guy [00:01:00] Hey, this is Guy Lawrence of 180 Nutrition. Welcome to another stellar episode of the Health Sessions, of course, where we are connected with leading global health and wellness experts to share the best and the latest science and thinking, empowering us all to turn our health and lives around. This week we welcome back to the show the one and only, awesome, Mr. Professor Tim Noakes from South Africa. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Tim's work, he has published more than 750 scientific books and articles. He's been cited more than 16,000 times in scientific literature. He has a H-index of 71 and has been rated an A1 scientist by the National Research Foundation of South Africa for a second five year term. Amazing. He has won numerous awards over the years, and made himself available for many editorial boards, and of course, has a very famous book. The Law of Running is considered the bible of the running sport itself. It was just a privilege to get Tim back on the show today and pick his brains on what he's been up to over the last few years. [00:01:30] Now, if you're unfamiliar with Tim more recently ... Well, I say more recently, a few year ago, which we get into today, he kind of flipped his way of thinking around fueling for sport where he had been for 33 years promoting the low-fat, the carb loading, endurance sport diet for athletes. Then had a complete turn around and came out with that, which is a huge deal. We get into that today, and over the five years since, I think, this has happened what he's been up to and his fights against type II diabetes as well in South Africa. We get into sports recovery, sports hydration from his famous book, Water Logged, as well. [00:02:00] It's all in there and you are going to love it. If you do love the show guys, just share it with people that you think are going to benefit from this kind of information because we're getting more and more people listening to our podcast. We're getting more and more emails and from people that are just having these epiphanies around their health, and it's definitely helping everyone, including ourselves as well. Help spread the love, share the word, and get this information out there with people, because it does change people's lives. Anyway guys, let's go over to Tim. Hit me up on Instagram stories if you enjoy the episode. Oh, I've also started my own little Instagram channel as well, which is Guy H. Lawrence, which you can follow me on there as well, outside of 180 Nutrition. Awesome guys. Let's go over to Tim Noakes. Enjoy. Hi, this is Guy Lawrence. I'm joined with Stuart Cooke as always. Hello Stu. Stu Hello, mate. Guy Our fantastic guest today is Mr. Tim Noakes. Tim, welcome back to the podcast. Tim Thanks very much Guy, lovely to be back with you. Guy It's phenomenal, mate. I can't believe it's been over three years since you last come on, and I have no doubt a lot has happened since then that we can get into today. Tim Yeah. Guy Tim, there's a question that we ask everyone on the show at the moment and that is, if a complete stranger stopped you on the street and asked you what you did for a living, what would you say? Tim At present I'm retired, so I do what I want to do. Essentially, I'm finishing up a five-year trial against me on the basis that I gave information on Twitter, which was considered unconventional. What we did was, we put the low-fat diet on trial. We said, "Okay, if you're going to try me for this nonsense, let's see whether there's any evidence that the low-fat diet is healthy." So we put it on trial, and the trial ended on April the 21st and I won 10-0. Full Transcript & Video Version: http://180nutrition.com.au/180-tv/tim-noakes-interview/

Adam Zickerman discusses his 90-day journey of religiously dedicating himself to following a ketogenic diet here in Episode 25 of the InForm Fitness Podcast.  Adam reveals the challenges of sticking to the ketogenic diet along with some misconceptions and the dramatic results.Here is a link to the website Adam mentions in this episode:  http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/ketosis-advantaged-or-misunderstood-state-part-i Don't forget Adam's Zickerman's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution.  You can buy it in Amazon by  clicking here: http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTenTo find an Inform Fitness location nearest you to give this workout a try, please visit www.InformFitness.com.  At the time of this recording we have locations in Manhattan, Port Washington, Denville, Burbank, Boulder, Leesburg and Reston.If you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question.  The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. For information regarding the production of your own podcast just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.comThe transcript to the entire episode is below: Adam: You know when you're wearing clothes, my lean muscular build, it's hard to know that I was getting a little bit of a spare tire underneath them, but I was getting a little bit of a spare tire, but besides that, there were two things. One, my chronic back problems which you covered last episode, and I wanted to do whatever I could to ameliorate these back issues. Consistent and safe back exercises are one of them, and the other thought I had was maybe my diet is affecting my back, because I was reading a lot about the typical American diet and it's inflammatory. I'm thinking I might have an inflammation issue going, my back keeps going into spasm, it's probably chronically inflamed. If I can not only exercise my back properly but maybe reduce my chronic inflammation, that might be my answer. Tim: InForm Nation, welcome to episode 25 of the InForm Fitness podcast. Twenty minutes with New York Times bestselling author, Adam Zickerman and friends. I'm Tim Edwards with the InBound Podcasting Network and a client of InForm Fitness. Joined as always by Sheila Melody, Mike Rogers, and of course Adam Zickerman. Okay team, at the time of this recording, spring has just sprung, summer is just a few months away, and I'm sure a good portion of InForm nation is already thinking about summer which means they're thinking about slimming down a little or in some cases a lot, so dieting is on their minds. We've all heard of, and I'm sure participated, in at least a few nutrition plans, like the paleo diet, the Atkin's diet, or the one that I really enjoyed a few years ago was the slow carb diet from Tim Ferris. Most recently I had tremendous success by just eating cleanly as you describe Adam in chapter three of your book, Power of Ten: The Slow Motion Fitness Revolution.So Adam, you visited LA. just a few months ago when we recorded the Adam in LaLa Land episode and frankly, you looked extremely fit. So in the last episode, you mentioned that we're going to talk about a diet that you've been on for the last X amount of days, and my question is why did you even consider going on a diet in the first place because you don't look like you need to go on one.Adam: I picked up a few lessons from my female friends and I know how to dress to hide it.Tim: You wear Spanx, that's what you're telling me?Mike: Spanx and New York black. Everyone in New York knows how to hide it.Adam: Hide our emotions.Tim: You don't hide your emotions in New York, come on.Adam: The people in L.A want to hide their emotions.Tim: We're the passive aggressive ones.Sheila: Oh no, we want to talk about our emotions.Tim: That's down in the south where they're passive aggressive, but anyway, we digress. You mentioned the diet, and here's a guy, the guru, the InForm Fitness and you're fit. So what prompted you to go on a diet?Adam: I'm so glad you asked me that question, because you know the other question I get asked in a similar vein is why do you work out Adam, you look great. Sheila: You say because I never want to look like you.Adam: That just reminded me of something Yogi Bear once said. Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore, it's always too crowded. So listen, why did I go on this diet. Well first of all, diets are not always about weight loss, fat loss. Diets are about health, or they should be. Now I know that anyone who goes on a diet, their number one concern is I want to lose body fat, which is a noble goal because being overweight has health problems associated with it. Now I did want to lose a little weight first of all, because I always said that I hide it well half-jokingly, because the other half, I did need to lose a couple of pounds and it is true that when you're wearing clothes, my lean muscular build, it's hard to know that I was getting a little bit of a spare tire underneath them, but I was getting a little bit of a spare tire, but besides that, there were two things. One, my chronic back problems which you covered last episode, and I wanted to do whatever I could to ameliorate these back issues. Consistent and safe back exercises are one of them, and the other thought I had was maybe my diet is affecting my back, because I was reading a lot about the typical American diet and it's inflammatory. I'm thinking I might have an inflammation issue going, my back keeps going into spasm, it's probably chronically inflamed. If I can not only exercise my back properly but maybe reduce my chronic inflammation, that might be my answer. So for years, I've been reading about the ketogenic diet, and for years I was poo-pooing it.Tim: Why?Adam: Because I had a vast misunderstanding about what a ketogenic diet was. Basically using ketones for fuel. I'll get into what a ketone is a little bit later, but my understanding of ketones was when your body is using ketones for fuel, or if you're producing a lot of ketones, I always understood that to be very dangerous. In my mind without realizing it, I was really thinking about what they call ketoacidosis, which is much different than nutritional ketosis, using ketones for fuel from a nutritional point of view, as opposed to something very dangerous called ketoacidosis. That was where the confusion comes in. Whenever you talk to a doctor or a nutritionist and say I want to go into ketosis, they say it's dangerous, and being in ketoacidosis is very dangerous but you cannot go into ketoacidosis just by eliminating carbohydrates or going to what they call nutritional ketosis. Ketoacidosis, let me explain what that it is. It usually afflicts people with Type I diabetes. Type I diabetics cannot produce insulin, and when you cannot produce insulin, when you eat carbohydrates, the sugar starts building up and building up, and what happens is the body can't utilize that sugar, because the insulin is not there to use that sugar and bring it into the fat cells and the muscle cells, or bring it into any cell that needs that for energy. So the body, if it can't get glucose for energy, it starts metabolizing fat for fuel. That's where it's going to get it's energy from, and it starts going crazy producing these ketones. You see ketones come from fat, the metabolism of fat. An alternative sense of energy for the body are ketones, fat gets broken down into ketones, carbohydrates get broken down into glucose and when the body breaks down carbohydrates for glucose and those glucose molecules can't be used, the body will say okay, let me go break down some body fat, get some ketones out of it, and utilize that for fuel. So it's another source of currency if you will, and if you're a Type I diabetic, your body goes crazy producing these ketones and you end up having so many ketones that you go into an acidic state, a dangerously acidic state where basically all functions of the body cannot produce and cannot function when you're in such a high acidic state. In other words, we have to have a pH level that's very, very stable, like about normal, about 7. Our pH is about 7, that's the normal functioning pH of the human body. When you start having all these ketones that start going through the roof — ketones are acidic by the way, and ketones that are not being checked or regulated, start going through the roof and you are in a very dangerous state. So a Type I diabetic can very often go into ketoacidosis and they have to go the hospital, they have to get the injections, and usually it's a diabetic that's not taking care of themselves. You cannot go into that acidic state being in what I have been in the last ninety days which is called nutritional ketosis. Nutritional ketosis is a state in where you body instead of using glucose for fuel, not because there's no insulin, but because you're not eating anything that's going to produce a lot of glucose, your body says well I need energy, so I'm going to start using fat for fuel. Every cell cannot use actual fat for energy, they have to break down the fat. Just like we have break down carbohydrates for glucose, we have to break down fat, and we're breaking them down into fat and these ketone bodies are being used for fuel. Well there's a lot of evidence right now that's showing that these ketogenic diets which are to break it down into macronutrients about 70-75% fat, about 10% protein, maybe 15% protein, and then the rest which is about 5% carbohydrates.Tim: Now immediately, red flags are flying all over when you say the diet is made up of 75%  fat. Now let's drill down on that a little bit more. We're not talking cheeseburgers.Adam: Well we're not talking cheeseburgers with the bread, but we are talking cheeseburgers. I will have red meat, I will have cheese. Red meat has to be grass fed, not this factory raised cow. So the quality of the foods that you're eating is also very important, so I eat grass fed beef and beef, the fat in the beef is very good for you. What you have to be careful of, this is what I realized and this is a very common mistake that people make on ketogenic diets, that they think it's a high fat, high protein diet, but it's not really high protein. Having too much protein can actually produce an insulin response or produce sugar, because protein can be converted into glucose, it's called gluconeogenesis, and it can be almost as bad as actually eating carbohydrates. A lot of people will eliminate their carbohydrates and they'll end up having tons of red meat, which is a lot of protein.Tim: That sounds like the Atkin's diet to me.Sheila: That's what I was just going to say.Adam: The Atkin's diet, in essence, a ketogenic diet and the misinterpretation of the Atkin's diet of a ketogenic diet is that the image is like a bunch of caveman sitting around gnawing on a dead animal or something like that and just eating fat and bacon and protein all day long. It's not like that, it's mostly vegetables that are saturated in fat like olive oil, or coconut oil or avocado oil. Salads that are doused in that kind of fat, so getting vegetables or other types of oils and avocados in general, grass fed meat, pasture raised chickens, eggs, and of course wild fish. That is my diet, and it's not like I'm eating tons of meat. I'm eating six ounces of a steak, I'm eating tons of brussel sprouts that have been roasted in coconut oil.Tim: All sounds good to me so far.Sheila: Probably 85% of the time I eat exactly what you just described.Adam: I committed to eating this way without exception for ninety days. I started at the beginning of this year.  Here we are. Tim: Where are you now at the time of this recording?Adam: It's a coincidence but I am literally, today, on my 90th day. It started January 3rd, which is a Tuesday. So I don't know if it's the 90th day, but I just finished my twelfth week starting January 3 and this is a Tuesday. So today is the last day of my twelfth week.Mike: I don't think 90 is divisible by seven.Tim: Well he's close.Mike: I've got my advocates in the corner there.Tim: So nonetheless, let's review.Adam: By the way, at the beginning I said why I did this. I thought it'd help my back, anti inflammatory. Ketogenic diets are well suspected to be anti-inflammatory. The second reason why I wanted to do this diet was because I had my annual checkup and I'm in my early 50s now, but 50s nonetheless, and my blood work is creeping the wrong way. They're starting to get on the high side of normal.Tim: Let me ask you, is that prior to going on the diet?Adam: Prior to going on the diet, I had my annual checkup and the results came in and he said to me hey, nothing to be alarmed about at this point but you're trending the wrong way. You're C-reactive protein is creeping which is an inflammatory marker, and he said your cholesterol is creeping up, it's not too high per se but it's on the higher side of normal. My A1C which is an indicator of your blood sugar was creeping up again on a high side of normal. I was like wow. These are all things that indicate that I'm going towards what many Americans go towards which is metabolic syndrome. It reminded me the same situation that Dr. Peter Attia, his story when he started his quest on ketogenic diets, and he was in the same situation. He worked out all the time, he thought he ate well most of the time. We think eating well is eating whole grain breads, and fruits, and occasionally what's so bad about having a beer here and there, and next thing you know, in a day you're still ingesting 250 grams of carbohydrates without even thinking about it. So he started taking control of it as well, and when I saw that my blood numbers were going up and then I read what Dr. Attia went through as well, I was like holy cow that's me. So that also prompted me, I wanted to see if going on a ketogenic diet would change these numbers. Well this is the 90th day so I'm about to get those numbers checked, so I'm going to report back on this but when I can talk about now is how I feel. Tim: Let's start with your back.Adam: And what has happened. First of all my back, in combination with what I've been doing with my lower back exercises and staying consistent with that, my back has never felt better. I can sit for hours in a car, or I can sit for hours at my desk, and get up sideways.Tim: And you're giving this ketogenic diet credit for assisting with that.Adam: First of all, I'm a sample size of one, so this is scientific at all, but I am giving it credit. That in conjunction with taking care of my back with the exercises. So I don't know where the cause and effect is because I've been doing a couple of things at once, but the big teller is going to be obviously the blood work that I get done soon. Besides that and besides the fact that my back feels better, I've lost fifteen pounds of weight that you didn't think that I needed to lose. So I look a lot better naked now, so I don't have to wear clothes anymore. I don't have to wear a T-Shirt to the pool anymore.Mike: You know when your body gets a little bit smaller, it gives the illusion that other things are bigger.Adam: You have that as well. Big thing that I noticed was my digestion. My digestion changed dramatically. I don't have upset stomach, my elimination if you know what I'm talking about has been undramatic, it's been beautiful.Sheila: It's a beautiful thing.Tim: Well your good friend Dr. Oz would be proud of that.Mike: Maybe this will get edited out, maybe it won't, but I'm just curious. What does beautiful mean? Tim: That actually is so it will not be edited out, so describe beautiful? You mean like one clean long — Adam: Exactly, tapered on both ends, perfect.Tim: Dr. Oz was his thing right?Adam: It's embarrassing, especially since you're talking about me.Mike: You don't sound like you're embarrassed.Adam: I am. You've got to remember that this is someone who is too shy to urinate in front of his wife. Mike: I'm going to remind you that you're the one who is talking about himself right now. Tim: So nonetheless there's a lot of fiber in this diet and it's really helping Adam a lot, so good.Sheila: That's really, really very interesting and I want to ask a question about is there a difference in how women react to this diet as opposed to how men react to this diet? Coming off that interview we had a few weeks ago with Dr. Sylvia Tera and The Secret Life of Fat, and how different men and womens' makeup is and how we process fat and everything. It sounds like something I'd like to try, and I feel like I've been kind of doing this for the most part.Tim: I think she's committing, I think she should jump on 90 days.Adam: I'm not sitting here saying everyone should jump on the ketogenic diet bandwagon first of all. I need to make that disclaimer. First of all, women are different and we're all different. I'm different from another man, and women certainly have their issues. When you talk about nutrient partitioning and that no matter what you eat, some of it is going to be partitioned to fat. Hormonal issues with women as they get older, all kinds of things. Genetics for men and women are different amongst ourselves and all these things play into it for sure, but having said that, sugar is bad. Sugar is bad, sugar is inflammatory. There is nothing good that comes out of sugar and excessive carbohydrates. I don't believe being in ketosis is dangerous anymore, and this idea of eating a lot of fat, even if it's saturated fat, especially if it's saturated fat, is not bad for you. It's been shown over and over again that dietary fat does not raise your cholesterol, so just check that box off. It's not true, it is just not true that eating egg yolks and eating red meat raises your cholesterol, that is not what is raising your cholesterol. The last ten, fifteen years have been really showing that. My blood work will show this, if I go to my blood work and my cholesterol is through the roof I'm going to have to eat my words. It might even be another cause of it, but the thing is if all my triglycerides are good and inflammatory makers are lowered and my cholesterol happens to stay on a higher side, and everything else is really, really good, I'm not going to worry about high cholesterol. High cholesterol, high LDLs are not a very good marker on heart disease.Mike: On its own.Adam: On its own. Now there's this other test that Dr. Attia actually told me to get which is an NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance test, to test for your LDLP. See when you go to the doctor and you get your cholesterol and blood work done, you're getting blood work for your LDLC. LDLC is how much cholesterol, low density cholesterol is in your blood, whereas the LDLP is showing you how many LDL proteins are in your blood. I'm getting technical right now, but it's a different marker and a much better marker and indicator of potential heart disease, this LDLP. So I'm going to get that done, and see if my LDLP is nice and low, and if that is, regardless of what my LDLC is or total cholesterol is, I'm not going to be worrying about it. Again, my A1C, my C reactive protein, these markers, if they stat going down after ninety days of eating, I'm not kidding you, 70% of my diet being fat, I'll be pretty convinced. At least for myself. Let me tell you about my experience psychologically.Tim: I'm curious how you managed this, because it seemed like a lot of drastic changes.Adam: This is why I'm not necessarily telling people to just go on this ketogenic diet. First of all, I'm not a nutritionist, I just play one on TV. So I'm a nutritionist, secondly, I'm not going to lie, it's not easy to adjust to this type of diet. If you're used to eating grains and carbohydrates — I'm essentially a vegetarian that is saturating their vegetables with saturated fat and all kinds of fats, and having small portions of animal protein, whether it be a chicken or a fish or a cow, all well raised, but they're small quantities. I'm not eating a lot. I'm also intermittent fasting. I'll go at least two or three times a week, I'll go anywhere from eighteen to twenty four hours without eating. I'll be drinking lots of liquids, I'll be drinking homemade beef broth or chicken broth, and that's it. So that's all I eat, one meal all day.Tim: So tell us your schedule Adam. So with this intermittent fasting, what time are you stopping eating at the end of the day?Adam: I'll eat dinner.Tim: At what time?Adam: Anywhere between five and seven most days. So let's say I finish eating seven. I won't eat again until at least two or three o'clock the next day. On some cases I won't eat again until dinner the next day.Mike: When you work as much as we do, I've got to be honest with you, time flies and you sometimes forget about food. I'm not as strict as Adam is, but I'm probably doing about 85% or 90% of what he is doing in regards to the ketogenic model, and the fasting model without even trying to.Adam: We work a lot and that speaks to one of the techniques that people recommend to help you through these intermittent fasts and that's distraction techniques. So when your mind keeps saying eat, eat, eat, distract yourself, pick up your guitar, write a letter, do something else. Distract yourself. A lot of this hunger by the way, is psychological, we're just not used to it mentally, but besides that, at the beginning, your body is physically wanting that food but once you start utilizing your fat for fuel and you become what they call keto-adapted where your body is primed to really use fat for fuel, and that takes a couple of weeks. Three weeks, four weeks sometimes. The first there or four weeks was the toughest because I was not adapted yet, so I was very hungry. Now, well it's 4:30 and I haven't eaten yet today. Last time I ate was dinner time around five yesterday.Mike: That's a lie, he had two celery sticks from me.Adam: That's true, it's two celery sticks so I broke my fast. Honestly I grabbed them because they were there, it was not because I was dying to eat something, and if I was dying to eat something, I certainly wouldn't have picked that.Sheila: When you say you're fasting, so you mentioned the broth though. So you have that when you're fasting, or you just have nothing, you have water.Adam: I have water mostly, but yeah, we serve bone broth here, we're making our own bone broth now. We can talk about that at a later date, but yeah, that doesn't count as cheating. It's 99.9% water, it just has the minerals and the amino acids in it. So I don't consider that really cheating, but come on. Even if I was to have a small meal, the gist of it is going long periods of time without eating, and that from my understanding is the real anti-inflammatory aspect. I mean sugar causes inflammation, and eating a lot also causes inflammation because you're breaking down all this stuff and getting all these free radicals and all this oxidative work going on, and that's what causes a lot of the inflammation. Now I'm reading and I'm learning that intermittent fasting forces the body to regenerate its cells at a lot faster of a rate. There's something to that.Sheila: I also read that an easier way to do the intermittent — well, for a sixteen hour fast that you can basically do is just stop eating at seven, and then don't eat again until eleven AM. That's sixteen hours.Adam: Basically skipping breakfast.Tim: A lot of people do that anyway.Adam: But this is the problem with intermittent fasting. When I go 24 hours, I'm hungry by then. A lot of people say they can go days without eating and these are people that are really and truly keto-adapted, maybe they've been doing it for a year or more. I don't know, but so far, I haven't been able to go more than seventeen hours without all of a sudden having all those hunger pains, and at that point I just deal with it for another few hours. At that point, when I do eat, this is the hard part. You have to eat a regular, small meal. Tim: No binging.Adam: It's so easy when you're famished like that and you've gone all day without eating, it's like you want to eat lunch, breakfast, dinner, and snacks all at one time in one sitting. You have to stop yourself from doing that.Mike: That's probably one of the differences to what was going on even before you did this 90-day thing. Our lifestyle really lent itself to — none of us eat that many carbohydrates ever. Adam hasn't for a while, but when you were, you probably — I'm just guessing because you're like me, I do these all day fasts also. If I don't have some snacks or prepare my food throughout the day as I did this week, I will come home and I will eat like seven pieces of chicken and I'm not proud of it afterwards. Unless you can control that voracious urge, you're not going to get what Adam is talking about here.Tim: So Adam, as we come to end of this episode, I really would love you to encourage you to get those tests done quickly, and if you don't mind, share some of them with our audience so that we can gauge your success. The question that I have for you right now as we put the wraps on this is okay, we're close to or at day 90. Are you going to continue and forge ahead with the exact same plan that you've had for the last three months or so, are you going to augment it a little bit, what are your plans?Adam: I'm going to continue, I'm going to stay on this. I might eat a little bit more often at this point, because I don't really need to lose anymore body fat. I've got the six pack going for the summer, that's all good.Tim: Look at you, he's in his 50s and he has a six pack, that's impressive.Sheila: Do you drink coffee, can I ask that?Adam: I drink coffee. Let me speak to something Mike just said. He was saying that we're generally very good about not eating carbs, and that's partially true, with me anyway. What I mean by that is I have two young kids and I grab the M&Ms. My wife buys five-pound bags of them so she can make pancakes for the kids. Don't get me started, my wife will not let me put my kids on a ketogenic diet.Mike: My wife is a nutritionist and she would never let it happen either.Adam: Because they're afraid of ketoacidosis, but anyway what I wanted to say was this. My diet before I started this, yes, I'd go three or four days really good, and then I'll eat a whole pizza. I would never really string along many consistent weeks or days. I'd eat well one day, not very much the other day, summers come, barbecue, hotdogs, hamburgers, I just went for it. I can get away with it. You said at the beginning of this piece, Adam you don't look like you need to lose weight, why'd you start this diet? I was creeping up, and even though it appears that I eat very well, and I obviously eat well most of the time. I certainly eat good foods but I also supplement them with not such good stuff. This last 90 days, I made a commitment not to deviate from that, to be really consistent with it. Yes it's higher fat than I would normally do when I did eat well. Less protein than I would normally — that's what I learned about a ketogenic diet, that most people make the primary mistake of eating too much protein on a ketogenic diet, and so this has been the first time in my life that I've been this disciplined in my eating. I'm older now, I can't get away with what I used to get away with. The other thing that I want to say before we wrap this up is about cravings. I always hear about how you go on these low carb diets and when your body starts getting used to and primed for utilizing fat for fuel, they say you eliminate all your cravings. Bullshit. To me anyway. Maybe the physical cravings aren't there and I told you I could go all day and not really be hungry, but the truth of the matter is, I'm craving the foods that I've been giving up nonstop. To this day, 90 days into it give or take, I still crave the pizza. I still see my kids eating the pizza, I still see the buns on the hamburgers and I want it, I want it bad. I say no, the cravings are there. Maybe the physical cravings aren't there as much.Tim: What do you mean by physical cravings, define that.Adam: My stomach growling and saying man you're hungry, you've got to eat. Or feeling a little lightheaded, or physically feeling the effects of hunger. Now that I'm keto-adapted I don't have those physical — when I'm 24 hours in I start to feel them, but eighteen hours fasts, it's a no-brainer for me, it's as easy as it could be. Even though those physical things aren't there, I pass a pizza place, I pass chicken wings at the Superbowl, hot dogs at the baseball game. Beer, alcohol, I want it all, those cravings have not subsidized. I don't look at them and say ew. I want it badly, but I don't do it.Sheila: It's easier to not do it.Adam: So going forward, I'm going to continue my strict ketogenic diet for at least another 30 days. I might eat a little bit more food, but not the foods I'm not supposed to be having on a ketogenic diet. The foods I can have, add a little bit to my portions, but that's the extent of it for the next thirty days. By that point, I'll have my blood work done and we'll talk about this some more.Mike: I just think before we wrap up, I think blood tests aside, that's data that we all need. It's great to get all that stuff, but the bottom line is you've taken an educated approach to selfexperimentation and troubleshooting your body to figure out how to improve it, and your back has felt better. Do we know it's because of the ketogenic diet, maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but regardless you're in a trend where you feel so much better. Your body feels better, your back feels better. You like the way you look, you feel, it's like I almost want to say — if the tests are completely negative or there's no improvement or any markers have been changed, who cares. Looking at someone who looks healthy also. They say that they feel great but they don't look healthy, but this is not the case.Adam: Like vegans. First of all, I want to say that this is not a ringing endorsement or a push for people to go ketogenic. I'm not going to be that bull at this point to say something like that. It's definitely a viable option, and before you go into something like this, check with your doctor and do a lot of research, because compared to the recommendations by the ADA, the American Diet Association, this is not what's recommended. I want to make this disclaimer. Look into it for sure, do your research. If it sounds like you, if I sounded like you, definitely look into it. Like Mike just said, I'm very well researched. I have a background in biochemistry, I know how to read these things. I'm a little bit different than your average bear when it comes to this type of thing. If you're not in that world, you should get advice when you do something like this.Sheila: Can you give us a starting point?Adam: Yeah, I do, I recommend the doctor that I mentioned earlier. Dr. Peter Attia, and his website is called the eating academy. Read everything this guy writes, and he also refers you to other things he reads so that is a great start. The eating academy by Dr. Peter Attia. So if you're interested in possibly doing this for yourself, well pay attention to our podcast, we're going to be reporting back on this in a little while when I get my blood work back and we'll take it from there. Good luck.Tim: Okay. So don't forget to check out the show notes for a link to the website that Adam referenced, spotlighting the research done by Dr. Peter Attia. That's eatingacademy.com. Looking forward to the results of Adam's blood work to gauge the success of his three-month ketogenic dietary journey, and we should have that for you coming up in the next few weeks. Also on the way, we have a couple of interviews that we're really excited about here at the InForm Fitness Podcast. In two weeks, we'll be speaking with happiness expert, Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen has authored several books and has sold more than two million copies in thirty different languages. She has been a client of InForm Fitness for many years, and she has a popular podcast of her own, titled Happier with Gretchen Rubin. So give it a listen and even subscribe to her podcast so you can become more familiar with Gretchen before she joins us here on the show, and in the process, pick up some valuable tips on being, well, happier. Next week, we'll be talking to Dr. Martin Gaballa, the author of the One Minute Workout. Adam and Dr. Gaballa will contrast and compare high-intensity strength training like we do here at InForm Fitness, and high-intensity interval training, as described in Dr. Gaballa's book, The One Minute Workout. If you'd like to find an InForm Fitness location nearest you so you can give this high-intensity strength training workout a try for yourself, please visit informfitness.com and at the time of this recording, we have locations in Manhattan, Port Washington, Danville, Burbank, Boulder, Leesburg, and in Restin. If you aren't near an InForm Fitness location, you can always pick up Adam's book via Amazon: Power of Ten, The Once a Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. Included in the book are several exercises that support this protocol that you canIf you aren't near an InForm Fitness location, you can always pick up Adam's book via Amazon: Power of Ten, The Once a Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution. Included in the book are several exercises that support this protocol that you can actually perform on your own at a gym nearest you. We'll have a link to Adam's book in the show notes as well. Thanks again for listening, and for Sheila Melody, Mike Rogers, and Adam Zickerman of InForm Fitness, I'm Tim Edwards with the InBound Podcasting Network.Thanks again for listening, and for Sheila Melody, Mike Rogers, and Adam Zickerman of InForm Fitness, I'm Tim Edwards with the InBound Podcasting Network.

Download the mp3 file. or go to mfg.mmmatters.com/ebook MM 064 - Website Tips for Manufacturers Guest: Tim Doyle, VP Sales at TopSpot Highlights: A top performing website must be first, aligned with your business goals. For example, one goal for a website may be to act as a sales generation engine. Another often forgotten goal is to make the website useful for customers and employees. [5:25] Tim estimates that less than 10% of industrial websites are top performers. Therein lies the opportunity for competitive advantage.[7:50] Is your website designed as a 'don't make me think' design? Tim mentions this resource, 'Don't Make Me Think' by Steve Krug. [9:15] Well crafted content that is relevant is one important essential piece of an effective website. [11:05] A website is not a statue, it is a laboratory that requires consistent maintenance, updates and continuous improvement. [14:30] Top 5 things you should do right now to improve website performance [15:30] Set up tracking and monitor results. Have an original benchmark. Analyze your sitemap in the context of identifying who you are and your differentiators. Use a free tool called Screaming Frog. Evaluate your site architecture for intuitive use and logical progression. Make sure the call-to-action is obvious and is it working. Test it. Incorporate multivariate testing in support of continuous improvement. Good Content Management Systems include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and, Tim's favorite, Modx. For ecommerce, Magento. [21:10] CAD drawings are fantastic for conversions on your website.  Check out Catalog Data Solutions. [23:20] If you hate your website, here are some website tips for manufacturers who want to build a new site. [25:00] An often overlooked value add for your site is to use professional photography highlighting your value to the target audience. [26:30] Send in your challenge question here. Interview Questions: Question 1 –  Let’s start off at 30,000 feet and then drill down. How would you characterize a top performing website? What percentage of websites that you see are top performers? Question 2 –  I think a lot of us and our audience judge a website intuitively. Could you propose a framework of sorts for evaluating a website?  (any references you could recommend?) A website must serve many masters; customers, prospective customers from the outside, then there’s HR, Finance, Executive leadership, PR on the inside.  Does a company have to choose one area to focus on or is it possible to serve all masters? Question 3 –  Let’s drill down into some details. What are the top 5 things (in order of importance) that we should focus on to build a new site or make an existing site into a top performer? What about the platform or content management system (CMS), what are the best ones for a B2B manufacturing website? Question 4 – Suppose I’m a VP Sales & Marketing for a B2B manufacturing company out there listening. I’m thinking to myself, my website sucks. In a quick list, what are my first 5 steps towards making it into a top performing, lead generating, sticky website machine? Challenge Question –  This week our challenge question comes in from the a VP Marketing at a San Diego area from a medical device company. Here it is “We make a medical device that measures blood coagulation. Our customers are hospitals and blood labs. One of our 2017 goals is to increase website traffic by 30% to ultimately increase the flow at the top of our sales funnel. Do you have any tips about how to increase website traffic for a medical device manufacturer?” First, define your goal. Be specific. Learn what your visitors are interested in achieving. Analyze the internal site search for insight into what your audience is looking for when they visit. It must be a holistic approach, not just one or two tactics. Use Google Custom Search, paid version, for internal search queries. Takeaways: Strive to build your website in a 'don't make me think' style. Use analytics tools and make sure you understand them or are able to use them for continuous improvement. TopSpot offer:  Contact Tim at tim@topspotims.com for a FREE website audit.  Put the words "Site Audit" in the email subject knowledge. Transcript: Bruce McDuffee : Welcome to Manufacturing Marketing Matters, a podcast produced by the Manufacturing Marketing Institute, the center of excellence for manufacturing marketers. I am Bruce McDuffee. Thank you for listening.     Hello manufacturing marketers. Thanks for tuning in to our show today. As a special offer to our loyal listeners, I'd like to offer a free PDF copy of a book that I authored specifically for manufacturing marketers. The mission of the book, just like this show, is to help you manufacturers or marketers, or business development pros working for a manufacturer, to advance your professional careers in marketing, and also advance the marketing function at your company.     The book is called, "The New Way to Market for Manufacturing". You can get your copy, again it's a PDF copy, at mfg.mmmatters.com/ebook. I'll put that in the show notes too, so you don't have to write that down. There's just a short registration form, no other requirements. Please check it out.     Onto the show. Our guest expert today is Tim Doyle. Tim is the Vice President of Sales at TopSpot. Welcome Tim.   Tim Doyle: Well thank you, Bruce. It's a pleasure to join you.   Bruce McDuffee : It's great to have you on the show. You're up in the Chicago area, is that right?   Tim Doyle: I am.   Bruce McDuffee : You guys get some snow up there today?   Tim Doyle: Icy rain. Icy rain, I'd rather have snow frankly.   Bruce McDuffee : We got about four or five inches here in Denver.     Folks, today our topic for discussion is the website, in the context of B-to-B manufacturing companies. We're going to discuss what makes a great website. Perhaps what makes a bad website. Why there are so many bad ones out there. How you can have one of the best websites in your space. If you want a website that works for you by creating demand and creating leads, then listen up. This show is perfect for you.     Before we get into the interview, Tim, would you please introduce yourself to the audience with a little bit about your expertise and experience around industrial websites.   Tim Doyle: Well, absolutely. Thank you so much. Bruce, as you mentioned, I'm Vice President of Sales at TopSpot. I actually have 30 years in industrial advertising. Like yourself, I'm one of the old dogs.   Bruce McDuffee : I'll say it. You started when you were 10 years old then.   Tim Doyle: Correct, absolutely, with crayons, crayola, drawing diagrams of actuators.   Bruce McDuffee : That's how I imagined it.   Tim Doyle: Yeah, I went to school for it at Western Michigan. I [inaudible 00:03:05] in advertising and immediately transitioned into industrial advertising. Growing up in the Detroit area, that was kind of a natural for me. Very quickly on, I actually was aligned with what many people would know if I mentioned the brand, but it was a very well-known industrial directory. My entire career has been content based and key word based. My transition to the web was quite seamless actually.   Bruce McDuffee : I know exactly who you mean. The old directory, yeah. We don't have to name them, but yeah. I can picture them. Good, that's great. That's a great background. So you were a pioneer in websites then it sounds like.   Tim Doyle: Yeah, back in the late '80s, we were actually developing searchable CD-ROM catalogs for bearing manufacturers, actuator manufacturers, all kinds of companies to help them target their demographic.   Bruce McDuffee : Great, thanks for sharing that background.   Tim Doyle: Sure.   Bruce McDuffee : I was thinking. We were chatting a little before the show here, Tim. I would wager that 95% of the manufacturing marketing audience out there have a business website, maybe even a little higher. I would also bet that probably only about a third are really happy with their website. This is just anecdotal. Are you seeing the same type of thing, or are you seeing something the opposite? What's your take on that?   Tim Doyle: No, I would agree with that. Frequently, people put up a website and they think it's just work. Then they're disappointed. Even the people who are happy sometimes, aren't doing the things that really give them an understanding of how to improve. I would say you're right about a third of people are happy, but that even then they're missing out on some opportunities.   Bruce McDuffee : Agreed. That's what we're going to talk about today folks. How can you get your website to work for you, and help grow and build your business? First question, Tim, let's start off at high level, 30,000 feet, and then we'll drill down. How would you characterize, or how would you define a top performing website?   Tim Doyle: I would suggest that a top performing website is in alignment with what your goals are as a business. If you have a set of goals, is the site clearly articulating what is in alignment with what those goals might be? If that makes sense. Do you have tracking in place to measure over time so that you can make adjustments, to put that data into play?   Bruce McDuffee : Goals should probably be more than just, "I want to put up a brochure website, lists all my products." Goals should go beyond that like- Can you talk a little more about that?   Tim Doyle: One of the goals of a website is to produce business. I call it making it into a sales engine, so to speak. Is it providing you with a continuous stream of high quality opportunities that are in the demographic you're going after? If it's not, then it's not in alignment with one of your most important stated goals. You have to analyze that.     Other goals of the site could be, "Is it assisting you with your current customer base?" That is often forgotten about. "Could the website assist you with your customers and make you more sticky, educate your customers, be a true resource for your customers"? In that vein, "Is it also assisting your employees, and potentially doing their job, or informing them?" That can often be an overlooked goal or maybe a agree-upon goal of the website. Many times it's not doing that.     Then you've got sales reps. "Is the website an asset to them? Is it helping them do their job?" That is also an overlooked opportunity. In many cases, the website is failing in that regard.   Bruce McDuffee : It's like really any business development or marketing endeavor first step, decide what your goals are. Build that foundation. Makes sense.   Tim Doyle: Correct.   Bruce McDuffee : Great, Tim. Have you seen a lot of websites? Let's talk industrial or manufacturing websites, Tim. I'm sure you've seen probably hundreds. I don't know, maybe thousands out there. What percent would you say, I know this is anecdotal, are great websites that are really killing it with the business goals, and doing everything they can do?   Tim Doyle: You know, it's pretty low. Believe it not, I'd say maybe 10%. Even within that 10%, if they don't have a process of continuous improvement, then they're missing out on opportunities going forward. I know that sounds low, but it's what I see.   Bruce McDuffee : No, it's what I see too. I would believe 10%. As you said, maybe even less. Folks listening out there, this is ringing opportunity for you. Right, Tim?   Tim Doyle: Oh absolutely.   Bruce McDuffee : If it's only 10% are good, and the website let's face it, that's your focal point. That's where people find you. That's where they form an impression of you. That's where they evaluate you, on your website, without talking to anybody. There's an opportunity, folks. If you can make yours 1 in 10 top performing, talk about a competitive advantage. Wow.     Tim, I think a lot of us in our audience out there, just humans, will judge a website intuitively. Do we like it? Does it seem easy? Is the colors pleasant? Whatever it is. Maybe as a professional website person, if I may, could you? Maybe there's a framework or some specifics you could share with us for evaluating a website, whether it's our own or whether it's someone else's.   Tim Doyle: Absolutely. Is it built in what I call a "don't make me think" style of architecture? There's actually a book on usability. It's an old book. There was a rewrite on it. It's by a gentleman by the name Steve Krug called "Don't Make Me Think". Particularly in the industrial space, let's just say you're targeting engineers or engineering titles. Engineers typically, and I apologize for any engineers in the crowd, they don't suffer fools well. When they land on a page on a website that doesn't meet their needs, they're out very quickly. It has to do with what they immediately evaluate on the page they're landing on. If you're doing your job right, they not necessarily landing on your home page. They're landing on an internal page.     The entire structure of the site needs to be crafted in that "don't make me think" style of architecture. Meaning it gives you good visual cues in the navigation at the top, the internal navigation on the internal pages, the calls to action, the request to quote buttons, things of that nature. Maybe the downloadables or the videos, are they easily retrieved and used? Is it easy to take action on any given page?     We all put sites through that benchmarking and auditing when we land on a page. When it doesn't meet that criteria, typically we're out. It's like a phone number or an address that might not be easily visible. It causes frustration. That's a problem.   Bruce McDuffee : Big problem.   Tim Doyle: That's a serious problem. The other thing, by the way, is content. When a website doesn't meet the needs of say, let's use that engineering persona again. It doesn't have educational, instructive content, then again, it's frustrating them. It's not meeting their needs. They might very likely just leave the page. You always have to think about well-crafted content that comes from your voice as a company.   Bruce McDuffee : Product information is not enough. Is that what you're saying?   Tim Doyle: Right. We actually have an acronym for it. We call it "b smart". Things like brand, size, material, application, requirements, type. Then you could add to that certifications or industry specifications of some type. It could be SKUs in some way. Most of our clients are contract or applicators, but we do have some distributors, so it could be model numbers and SKUs. You have to think about content and a content strategy from that point of view.   Bruce McDuffee : Sure, that makes of sense. To step back, the book was called, "Don't Make Me Think". It was by Steve Krug?   Tim Doyle: Krug. Yeah, it's an oldie but a goodie.   Bruce McDuffee : Sometimes the oldies are the best. Sometimes the oldies are even more relevant today than the newies. I can relate to that completely.     Tim, I had a client. I still work with him. One of the first things I did when I started a few years ago, was to evaluate their website. I went in to look at their website. They were selling electronic instruments. Evaluate the website, and the first thing I told them is, "You know, it's really hard for me to buy something from you. It's hard to get a quote. It's hard to see your prices. It's hard to see how I'm supposed to buy." Big problem. If it's hard for your clients to make a purchase or get the information they want, big problem. I agree with you, Tim.   Tim Doyle: Absolutely.   Bruce McDuffee : A website, and we alluded to this a little earlier, a website has to serve many masters. You've got existing customers. You've got prospective customers. Then you've got other things like human resources, finance, maybe investment, executive leadership, public relations. A website has to serve all of these and sometimes more. Tim, in your experience, does a company have to really pick one of those and focus on it at the expense of others? Or is it possible to serve all those masters well?   Tim Doyle: It is possible to serve them all. Again, it comes from a comprehensive content strategy really. If you did have to choose, you're typically going to choose in the area of new business development. But when you think about that, that is a huge content need, right?   Bruce McDuffee : Sure.   Tim Doyle: If by doing that, you're quite often meeting the needs of some of those other stakeholders. Then because some people don't have the resources to go live with the new website to meet the needs of all the stakeholders, you just have to make sure- We're going to talk about this is in a little bit. ... that your site is built in a CMS that allows for scalability so that you add over time. A lot of people think of a website, they think that they know that they're done. They think of it as a statue. You build a statue. You put it in the square, and what happens? Pigeons sit on it.   Bruce McDuffee : They do more than that on it.   Tim Doyle: [crosstalk 00:14:25]. Yeah, we think of it as a laboratory. Your website's a laboratory. Even if you go live with what you believe at the time to be terrific content to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, no, no, no, you're not done. You have to have a system in place of evolving that content based on that data analysis over time. That's how you get the most out of your website.   Bruce McDuffee : Got it. So it's an ongoing, continuous improvement project really.   Tim Doyle: It has to be. That's what the top performers do. They have that in place.   Bruce McDuffee : They have a team or maybe they hire somebody to continuously keep that content fresh.   Tim Doyle: Sure. Absolutely.   Bruce McDuffee : Great, that's good to know. That's good advice. Let's drill down a little bit more into some details. I'm going to ask you for a list. What would say are the top five things? If you can prioritize, that are our listeners and that we should focus on if we're going to build a new site, or make an existing site into a top performer? What are those top five things you would suggest?   Tim Doyle: I think the first thing you need to do is set up tracking. Most people would say, "Yes, I've got Google Analytics on the site." But they never look at it. They've never checked to see if it's set up right. You have to an original benchmark. Google Analytics, when set up correctly, is an excellent tool to do just that. It will help you analyze the traffic to all the pages on your site, and any conversions that are occurring, and events that are occurring on the website. So that you have an original benchmark to look to. That can give you guidance in your content. Number one, Google Analytics and benchmarking the original data.     The second thing would be analyze the site map. Look at the site map. The site map is a list. It's the list of all the pages on your website. I call it "Your roadmap to success" because it shows you okay, this is the current content on my site. This is how it's labeled, the content theme of these pages. You have to look at that and say, "Okay, to clearly describe who I am and what are my unique differentiators as a supplier or a potential supplier." If the site map is done correctly initially, it will do that. You will clearly define who you are, knowing that that site maps going to grow over time. So you'll have top level pages and then sub pages that come off of that. If you've ever seen a site map, it's like a tree. It just comes down and then you've got branches coming off of it.     So number one, analytic benchmarking. Number two, analyze your content through your site map.   Bruce McDuffee : Quick question on that, Tim. What if someone's wondering how do I find my site map? Is there an easy way to do it?   Tim Doyle: Your web developer may have put a simple link down at the bottom. Sometimes you can after the .com, you could put /sitemap. There are other tools too though. You can use a tool called Screaming Frog.   Bruce McDuffee : Sure, I've heard of that.   Tim Doyle: Screaming Frog, it's a free tool, but you can get a paid version of it. It will allow you to crawl all the crawlable pages that it sees on your website. That can give you a sense of the content pages on your site. Screaming Frog. It's an easy download.   Bruce McDuffee : Great, thanks.   Tim Doyle: Sure. Then number three, you want to look at site architecture, your site architecture. Is it intuitive, as we were just talking about? Does it meet that "don't make me think" style of architecture?     Four and five, let's talk about four. You want to make sure that your calls to action are very obvious. A call to action is like a button that says, "request quote". That's a call to action. Is it very visible? The next thing would be are you doing testing with variables? If you've got calls to action on your website now, have you ever tested different versions of them to see which perform at a higher level? Again, benchmark the before and after picture. But you may have a request a quote link in the upper navigation. Then you test an obvious button on every page persists in the same location to see if you get a better engagement with the RFQ form.     I'm amazed at some of the performance improvements you get just by subtle tweaks to a button, or the language on a button, or even a form. You can test different versions of forms with different fields in them. You may have a more complex form. You may have a simpler form. In the industrial world, you should make sure that all of them allow for attaching a file because particularly with the contract fabricators, you want to get the drawing.   Bruce McDuffee : Right. Good. So number one, analytics, and benchmarking. Number two, make sure you have a site map that makes sense. Number three, make sure your site architecture is easy to follow and makes sense. Number four, make sure your call to action is obvious. Then number five was testing the variables. Is that right?   Tim Doyle: Yes. Multivariate testing, also known as conversion improvement.   Bruce McDuffee : Sure. Those are great five steps folks. If you want to make your website better, look at those five things first. Probably not the end of the list, right Tim? At least a good start.   Tim Doyle: Oh, I know. You could go on and on, absolutely. If you start with that, you're in a good place.   Bruce McDuffee : Great. Thanks. What about the platform or the content management system, the CMS? Do you find that some are better than others? I know Word Press is a widely used CMS. What are you seeing? What would you advise when someone's picking a CMS?   Tim Doyle: Yeah, Word Press is the most popular one. I would say about 60% of the websites on the web now are built in Word Press.   Bruce McDuffee : Is it that high?   Tim Doyle: Probably. The challenge with that is, is that it's a prime target for spammers that try to inject malware on your site. We do see hacked sites quite a bit. The main tip if you have a Word Press website, or any CMS for that matter, is make sure you are continually updating the version and the security updates on the CMS.     But also, particularly for Word Press, the security updates on the Word Press plugins, there's a lot of plugins that Word Press uses. Quite often we see this with manufacturers quite a bit. They don't even know all the plugins they have on their site. They don't update them, the security updates. They will get malware injected in the site. Be careful. It is a good CMS though. It's very intuitive. It allows for an easy crawl by the search engines. It's got a great editing tool.     Having said that, there's some other ones out there that are very good too. There's obviously one called Drupal. That's an open source CMS as well. There's one called Joomla. Both of which are very widely used.     The one that I prefer though, it's one that maybe not as well known. It's open source. It's extremely intuitive. It's called MODX. You can Google it, or go to YouTube and Google it. You'll see the backend editing tool and some interesting features and functionality of the CMS. The reason I love MODX is it's very secure. They keep control of their plugins and the contributors for the plugins. It also allows for a very easy crawl by the Google bots. So your content reveals itself very efficiently to Google. The editing tool is extremely intuitive. As a matter of fact, when you log into the editing tool in MODX, the file structure on the left looks very much like Microsoft Outlook. The icons on the editing tool look just like Microsoft Word. Even without any training, you can typically figure it out. Then with some training, you get some advanced knowledge on it. You can really take ownership of the content on your site, so CMSs.   Bruce McDuffee : Pretty easy to use?   Tim Doyle: Yeah, very easy to use. Those are the non-e-commerce platforms. If you are in e-commerce, say you're a distributor and you've got 20,000 SKUs, you might be looking for something like a Magento platform. Magento is a very well known e-commerce or quote cart platform.     Then if you are into components like bearings, or variable speed drives, or things like that, you might want to be providing CAD drawings. CAD drawings, are in my mind, at the top of the food chain as it relates to a goal conversion. Because when you specced in, you get purchased over 90% of the time because the purchasing agent typically doesn't swap out what the engineer has specced in. It has been our experience. If you are a distributor or a component manufacturer, in that way would want to provide CAD drawings, there's an excellent tool out there by a company out of San Jose called Catalog Data Solutions. You may have heard of them.   Bruce McDuffee : Sure.   Tim Doyle: It's an excellent CAD library that you can easily integrate. We've integrated dozens with MODX websites. It makes for a very robust content environment on the site.   Bruce McDuffee : I've heard that from other folks too. It seems like this might be one of those opportunities for some manufacturers is if somebody downloads your CAD file, it's a pretty strong buying indicator isn't it?   Tim Doyle: It's a rifle shot indicator. [crosstalk 00:24:10] It's one of the most accurate methods of getting specced in right there is if you're offering up CAD drawings. It's excellent.   Bruce McDuffee : I've heard that too. That's a bonus for the show folks. CAD drawings, use it to get more business.   Tim Doyle: Absolutely.   Bruce McDuffee : The last question before the challenge section, Tim. Suppose I am a VP Sales and Marketing for a B-to-B manufacturing company. I'm out there listening to the podcast. Maybe I'm thinking to myself, "Boy, my website sucks." In a quick list, what are my first five steps? Maybe this is the same as the previous question, but I hate my website. It's not working. Is there another list? Are there things I should start with, for example, to redo that website? I'm going to redo the whole thing.   Tim Doyle: Well, some websites can be worked with. Again, if it's built in a good CMS, if it's mobile responsive, and it's just a matter of adding content and images and things of that nature, that's fine. But if it's a static website, if it's in an old CMS and not an updated version, it's not mobile responsive, you don't want to put lipstick on a pig, to be crude.   Bruce McDuffee : That's okay.   Tim Doyle: You really got to analyze, "Where am I?" In most cases I see lately, it's rebuilding the website.   Bruce McDuffee : Start from scratch.   Tim Doyle: Because it's not worth putting money into the old site that may have served you well. But very often, design standards for websites now have changed so much because of it's a multi-screen world, you don't know what size screen someone's going to be looking at your site on. Particularly with millennials, when you look at millennials, they grew up looking at their smart phones for the most part. Acquiring information through tablets and smartphones. You have to have a website that really sizes properly to meet those needs.     Some of this would be yes, does the content on the site clearly articulate who you are, what you do, and the industries you work with. That could be an easy one to look at beyond the CMS, how old it is.     Do you have high quality images? One of the best investments you can make as a manufacturer is in professional photography. It is very much not thought of by many of the clients that we initially start talking to. It's the easiest thing to do is get great imagery of the components you're machining. What looks better than a well-machined piece of 316 stainless?   Bruce McDuffee : Absolutely.   Tim Doyle: It just glistens. Or a piece of titanium that's machined with lots of value added. Get good photography. It's an asset to your company that you should continue to add to that archive. Have a process of continually adding to your image library. Frankly, it's a transferrable asset of your company. You sell the company, and you've got a 10 year archive of imagery. It has value. The value that it adds to your website is immense because it can take a good design and make it great.   Bruce McDuffee : As opposed to stock images off of?   Tim Doyle: Exactly.   Bruce McDuffee : Got it.   Tim Doyle: That's a big mistake. Big mistake to use just simple stock images all the time.   Bruce McDuffee : That's interesting.   Tim Doyle: [crosstalk 00:27:28] you do.   Bruce McDuffee : I have never come across that with my clients. That's fantastic advice. That's great.   Tim Doyle: Then the quality content, quality images, obviously the navigation, you talked about that earlier, and the architecture, and then the tracking. Obviously, the tracking, people forget about it. They don't really know how to look at the data. That is an obvious one where you would engage an outside firm. Because even if you hire someone who's pretty good at content development, you can't think that they're going to be an analytics expert too. Then the obvious calls to action of course, and the multivariate testing, which we talked about earlier. Those are some of the things that you might want to think about if you're a VP of Sales and Marketing [inaudible 00:28:08] a manufacturing company.   Bruce McDuffee : Thank you. I suppose one of the, like you mentioned early on in the show today, one of the most important things is to sit down before you even begin and say, "What are our goals? Who are we serving? What do we want this site to accomplish? What will a successful site look like?" Things like that. Lay that foundation, like you said earlier.   Tim Doyle: Yeah, exactly.   Bruce McDuffee : Good. Well, that's great advice. Folks, I'll put all of the mentions and the links that Tim mentioned in the show notes so we can take advantage of all his great suggestions. Tim, that brings us to the second part of the show, the challenge question. Folks, send in your challenge questions. These are questions from you that you send into the show. Then I pose them to a relevant expert. Well, I try to match it up to the expertise of the guest. Just email it to me. Bruce@mmmaters.com. Or you can hashtag it on Twitter at mfgmarketing, and I'll pick it up and I'll pose it to our guest expert.     This week our challenge question comes in from a VP Marketing in San Diego. By the way folks, these are usually kind of white labeled. That's how most folks want them. VP Marketing from the San Diego area, from a medical device company. Here it is. "We make a medical device that measures blood coagulation. Our customers are hospitals and blood labs. One of our 2017 goals is to increase website traffic by 30% to ultimately increase the flow at the top of our sales funnel. Do you have any tips about how to increase website traffic for a medical device manufacturer?" Tim, what do you think?   Tim Doyle: Well, it's the same advice I would give anybody. But we have to look at the goal, and we have to define the goal. Is increasing the traffic by 30% a top of the food chain goal? I would say well, anybody can increase the traffic 30% utilizing certain tactics or strategies. Is it the right traffic? We have to go back and look at the persona we're going after and target content and strategies that we know is going to resonate with them. Because we want to position you in front of those specific types of specifiers in hospitals and blood labs at the precise moment they realize they need to look for someone like you.     Knowing that, we want to look at certain things like, "How do they, when they have a need, search for these types of machines or systems that analyze blood coagulation?" One of the ways to do that would be to analyze what people are typing into your internal site search. If you have internal site search on your website, look at a date range of say six months to a year, and see how are people querying the content on your site. You know the internal site search. Bruce?   Bruce McDuffee : Sure.   Tim Doyle: It is the most underused tool for content analysis, for learning the intent of when people come to your site. You can learn exactly how they're thinking about it. When you think about blood coagulation, I think some people call it an INR. It's just another way of saying machine that analyzing anti-coagulation or coagulation. You can go either way with that, I believe.     The goal is to, I assume, increase sales. That's the number one goal. They're thinking that just by increasing traffic, we're going to do that. That's not always accurate. We got to go back to the goal is to increase sales. We got to get the correct people to the site. That means we have to use data, and iteration over time, to achieve that goal. Iteration of content over time.     I know I'm getting kind of deep in the weeds here, but you have to make sure that you've got very accurate KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, as to what you're doing. Having an original benchmark, rolling benchmarks over time, start developing the content, this is on-page, in collaboration with potentially articles on a blog.     Now you got to understand what does an article on a blog do? It typically brings visitors they're trying to educate themselves. They don't convert to an action at a high rate. But it puts out signals of trust to Google, Bing and Yahoo, so it's helping you achieve your organic optimization goals in totality.     Then you've got the on-page content that resonates with these potential buyers when they land on that page. With the proper calls to action, and the proper content, you should compel them to an action.     There's no magic bullet. It comes with a content strategy, based on analysis of the personas you're going after, and then tracking and benchmarking over time.   Bruce McDuffee : So just starting a blog, and blogging three times a week, that's not enough? Or is it enough?   Tim Doyle: No.   Bruce McDuffee : That's not enough?   Tim Doyle: No, it's not enough. You have to have a whole system approach. Blogging's great if you've got great articles. Typically comparative in nature, this versus that, you know what I mean?   Bruce McDuffee : Sure.   Tim Doyle: It can be a good place to start. What are your unique differentiators? How can a machine like this add value, either in speed or efficiency, or accuracy? It could be how to calibrate one, or things to look out for. Five things to look out for with blood coagulation measurement system. But you have to have the on-page content. That's the content on your landing pages that clearly articulates information about your systems, information about the way you approach the industry, things like that, brand size, material application, environment, and type. Remember, "b smart".   Bruce McDuffee : So the two work together.   Tim Doyle: Exactly. They work very much together. Now beyond that, once you've got your page, your on-page content very solid, and you've got a blogging strategy, then you can think about things like email blasts, and acquiring and building over time very accurate lists of potential customers to put out a message that is clearly supported by the content on your website, and the content in your blogs. Maybe video content, things like that.     There's no short path to success. It has to be strategic. Then you've got to execute based on a plan. Then evolve it over time based on data analysis.   Bruce McDuffee : It's a holistic approach. There's not one single tactic. That's interesting.   Tim Doyle: It has to be. It has to be a whole system approach.   Bruce McDuffee : You really need a professional, someone who really knows this stuff. You can't just give it to the marketing coordinator, who sets up the trade shows it sounds like.   Tim Doyle: No, it's not that you can't have someone who's pretty good at something in house. You do need to pair them with experts to assist them. Because you can't expect one person to be an expert in data analysis, an expert in content development, an expert in conversion improvement. You can't hire those unicorns.   Bruce McDuffee : Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, that was a great answer to that question, Tim. One thing you mentioned that the internal site search. For our listeners out there, you're saying that you can go in probably Google Analytics, and see every term that someone typed into that internal site search.   Tim Doyle: Correct. Some of the most valuable data you will ever get to look at.   Bruce McDuffee : I bet it is.   Tim Doyle: It gives you insights not just into content development, but frankly, it can give you insights into maybe some new service offerings that can take your business in a new direction.   Bruce McDuffee : Wow, that's powerful. It's not that hard to put it on your website either.   Tim Doyle: No, Google Custom Search, it's $100 a year for the subscription. Do not use the free version.   Bruce McDuffee : Okay.   Tim Doyle: Do not use the free version. Use the paid version. It's about $100 a year, worth every penny. Typically, it should be placed in the upper right hand corner of the website in the header. That's where people expect to see it, persistent on every page. You want them to use it. Now people like it. They like to use it. You want them to use it because it helps you refine your website. It gives you the strategy.   Bruce McDuffee : It gives you intelligence. That's great. That's a great tip.   Tim Doyle: Yeah, it's awesome. It's fantastic. It's so simple. I love simple stuff.   Bruce McDuffee : Yeah, it sounds simple. I'm going to put that on my website. That's great. All kinds of great tips today. Well Tim, that takes us to the final section, the takeaways. I always ask our guest experts if they would share one or two takeaways, maybe reemphasizing something we talked about, or maybe a couple of actionable nuggets going forward. What do you have for us today, Tim?   Tim Doyle: I guess keep it simple, on that theme. Can you truly say that your website is built in a "don't make me think" style of architecture, with tremendous content? If not, reassess. Do you have great analytic tools in place with data that you understand, or have access to people who can help you understand it, for continuous improvement?   Bruce McDuffee : Great, thanks Tim. Great takeaways. I know everyone is paying attention to this episode. Finally, before we sign off, Tim. Would you like to share anything about yourself or your company, TopSpot, with our audience?   Tim Doyle: Sure. TopSpot is an industrially focused web development and search engine marketing and analytics firm, based in Houston, Texas. We work nationwide and internationally. We specialize in working with industrial companies, manufacturers, and distributors. Of our 750 plus clients, I would say 90% of them are manufacturers and distributors, many of them contract fabricators. It's a core competency. I would offer, if you would like to reach out, Tim@TopSpotIMS.com. I'd be happy to do a quick audit of your website for free, and give you some tips and some personal guidance. No obligation.   Bruce McDuffee : That's a great offer. Thanks, Tim. I'll put that in the show notes folks, with Tim's email. That's a great offer. Take advantage.   Tim Doyle: Sure, just in the subject line, just put "site audit".   Bruce McDuffee : Site audit. Will do. Well, Tim, thank you so much for being a guest today on Manufacturing Marketing Matters sharing the knowledge, and tips, and experience, and those great examples. I know I certainly learned a lot today.   Tim Doyle: Awesome. Thank you so much for asking me. It's been an absolute pleasure.   Bruce McDuffee : That was Tim Doyle, Vice President Sales at TopSpot. For more information about Tim and TopSpot, visit the guest bio page and check out the show notes at mmmatters.com/podcast.     Finally, don't forget about that copy of the book. This is a limited time offer. The book's called, "The New Way to Market for Manufacturing". Just go to mfg.mmmatters.com/ebook.     Thanks for listening to Manufacturing Marketing Matters. If you find this podcast helpful and useful, please subscribe at iTunes or stitcher.com. You can download this episode of mmmatters and get the show notes and learn more about the podcast at mmmatters.com. I'm Bruce McDuffee. Now let's go out and advance the practice of marketing in manufacturing today.    

  Interview w/ Timothy Ballard Mark Mabry January 11, 2016 Final Transcript   Intro: You are listening to Slave Stealer. Tim: Welcome to Slave Stealer podcast, where we take you into the dark world of trafficking so you can help us find the solution. We are talking here with co-host, Mark Mabry. Mark: That’s me. And we did a little change in format. This is part two of our ‘Meet Tim’ series, because he has had a really interesting story. And what I found amazing in getting to know Tim over the last few years, is that sacrifice of peace of mind, sacrifice of kind of this level of innocence that 99.9% of the rest of us enjoy. And, to recap, we talked about Tim’s story a little bit, how he got into child crimes, and how he was invited by HSI to be on that team, and then we talked about his family. He has got young kids, and his son is now 15. And, the birds and the bees talk is awkward enough. What about that talk about what dad does for a living?” Tim: Well, you know, yeah..Let me say this first: I was scared to death some 15 years ago when I was asked to enter this dark world of child crimes. And the thing that scared me the most was the fact that I had kids, and I didn’t know how that would affect me. Would I see an image that reminded me of my kids, would that make me a paranoid father, would that turn me... My wife was scared to death that I would turn into just some cynical, just bitter old dude. And I was scared to death. I mean, you’ve got to wade through the sewer to find the crap. Mark: And what if the pornography took, I mean, worst case scenario, you turn into somebody that is actually into it? Not that that would happen with you knowing you, but... Tim: You know, what I have found that’s..a lot of people think that, and they go there, but... Mark: Those people are stupid. Tim: The people who had that suggestion are really idiotic. No, but it’s a logical conclusion. But what I have found is, frankly, kind of the opposite. Because when you are exposed to children - unless you are a pedophile, right - when you are exposed to that, it makes you want to distance yourself even more from all things pornography. At least that was my experience, and as I watched other agents who I have worked with, who have to be exposed to this. It turns you off so much to the whole industry, even the legal part of it, because it’s so, frankly, similar that it actually, at least for me, it has had the effect of major deterrent, even from any temptation my own part to even look at regular pornography. Does that make sense? Mark: Yeah! Tim: And, for the child stuff, it is just a punch in the stomach every time, and it is worse and worse every time. And you learn how to cope, you learn how to be able to see this stuff and still move on. But, like in the last show, I was talking about how the first thing I want to do when I saw particular images or videos, is just grab my kids and bring them to the safest place I know, which is my home, and just hold them. And so the whole concept, the whole idea to your question of how I bring together these two worlds, of what I do outside versus what I do inside - you have to factor in all these things. But my kids do start asking questions. I was addressing a group that was doing a benefit for Operation Underground Railroad just two nights ago. And they had the kids there and they wanted me to talk about it, and it was so hard, because I’m sitting there, and they say, “Tell us what you do!”, and I’m going, “All right, well I’ll start...”       Mark: How old were the kids? Tim: Oh, the kids were as young as five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Mark: Oh, geez.. Tim: It was like all these neighborhood kids. And their parents wanted them to know that there are kids who are less fortunate and that we need to help them. That was the idea. So, I thought to myself, “I’ll start with the software that we are building.” The software is called ‘Stars’. It’s a pretty name. Until one of the kids says, “What does STARS stand for?” And it stands for Sex Traveler Apprehension Retention System, right? So, I say SEEEE ugh...I can’t say it, I can’t even say the name of the software! Mark: Super Terrific Apprehension... Tim: Yes! So, I couldn’t, and it was so..it’s so difficult. A little kid raises his hand after I’m talking about slavery in general terms, and he said, “Why would someone want to steal a child? Wouldn’t they rather steal an adult because they’d be better at being a slave and a stronger worker?” I just looked at this little kid, I was like, “I know exactly the truth of your question, I know how to answer that, but I cannot answer that.” And so these issues that I was grappling with at this charity event, are the same issues I grapple with every day with my kids. When they see something on the news, and with my small children I just tell them, you know, I help kids, we help kids, we help kids who’ve been kidnapped. That’s all they know, and they seem ok with that. But as they get older, they start asking questions. And it intersects at the same time that I need to start talking to them about the birds and the bees. My wife and I are very open, I mean, I think my job has made me the most desensitized to all things sex, like I can say anything to anyone, because the conversations that I have had with people, with perpetrators especially during interrogations, where we were talking about things, or undercover, where they’re selling me kids. There is nothing that makes me blush, right. So, I can just take my kids and sit down, and say, “Hey”, talk about everything, embarrassing things, everything from pornography to masturbation to dating and all this stuff. It is rare that we talk about that, somehow it leads to the fact that - again these are my more adolescent, teenage kids - it always leads to some kind of an explanation that they are asking me for about, “Why would an adult want to do that to a child?”      Mark: When they say THAT, what ..I mean.. Tim: I mean they kind of..they know, I mean, they figured it out. Mark: Yeah. Tim: They do, because they know what is what we’re talking about. And so, I think, in the world of child pornography and sexual abuse of children, you don’t want to be graphic with the kids at all, even with my teenage kids. I kind of let them just figure it out and let their brain stop them where they should be stopped, because the brain will do that. Mark: Oh, adults don’t even grasp it. Tim: Adults don’t grasp it. I was sitting with my father-in-law - a brilliant man, PhD - we were in his kitchen, this was when I was an agent, and I heard him, he started talking.. What had happened was that I arrested one of his friends - not like a close friend, right, but... Mark: ”So, what did you do today, Tim?” “Well, I busted Larry.” Tim: Right! Mark: I have heard this story. Tim: He knew this guy, he had been to his home. So he knew this guy, and he started saying, “You know...I kind of feel bad for this particular individual, because it’s not really their fault. I mean, these girls dress in a certain way that is provocative, and it is not totally their fault.” And, I’m just dying. I’m like, “Wait, wait, wait, what?! You are telling me that a 5-year old puts on clothes, and now it’s not the pedophile’s fault that they look at the 5-year-old!” And his eyes almost popped out of his head! He says, “Five years old?! Why are you talking about 5-year-olds?!”     Mark: He’s thinking the 17 ½-year-old. Tim: He’s thinking 17, 16 years old, where you can’t really maybe tell the difference between a 17- and an 18-year-old, right. His eyes popped out of his head, and he says, “What?!” I said, “Yeah...Dad, you don’t know this, but what George was looking at was 5- to 7-year-old children, boys and girls, being raped, ok?” Mark: They sent a picture in the tub. Tim: Exactly. Being raped by adults. And he just kind of put his head down, shook it, and he said, “Now, that is weird..” I remember he said, ”That is just weird...”, and he walked out of the kitchen. He couldn’t handle it, and I don’t blame him. Our minds don’t even let us go there. And this is the problem. This is the problem that, frankly, is the obstacle to the solution. And the problem is we don’t want to see, we don’t want to believe it. I remember in the very beginning, in the early 2000s, when we were taking cases, child porn cases, to the judges, federal judges and state judges on pornography cases, on child pornography cases. And they were sentencing them to the most minimal sentences. Like this one guy had this collection that was unbelievable, categorized it by the names - he would name the kids in the videos, and create little files for them. It was unbelievable. He had hundreds of thousands of videos, images and everything else. And when the judge sentenced him, he sentenced him to four or five months in jail, but weekends only.            Mark: What?! Tim: And, I thought, “What is going on?!” The prosecutor I was working with, she said, “You know, the problem, Tim, is they don’t get it.The judges don’t get it!” They don’t get it. And we asked the judges if we could please show..during the sentencing they brought me in, and said, “Agent Ballard wants to show you the images.” He said, “I don’t want to see that junk! I don’t want to see that junk.” He’s embarrassed to even look at it. The human side of him doesn't want to even watch him looking at it, so he says, “I don’t need to see, I don’t need to see it!” So, we didn’t show it to him, and then that sentence came out. I guarantee you, I guarantee you that he doesn’t want to accept it. You know, the reports indicated that the kids were as young as five or four years old. His brain - my theory - wouldn’t let him grasp it, wouldn’t let him grasp it. And so he just gave him this super light sentence. But if I would have just opened that laptop, and say, “You have to watch this, you need to see this.” Now, I’m not advocating for showing child porn to people.    Mark: Exactly. Tim: At all! At all! Mark: But, maybe we emphasize, highly illegal: if you download this, even for altruistic, I’m-going-to-expose-myself, but...   Tim: You will go to jail. Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Mark: Yes! Tim: But what I’m telling you is, be aware that it is there, and we have got to talk about it. It hurts...You mentioned that when you talk about this, and this is why people don’t want to talk about it, you hit the nail in the head: you lose part of your own innocence. Mark: Absolutely. Tim: And every time you talk about it, some more of your innocence, even as adults, it goes away. You have to sacrifice that, but you sacrifice it for the kids. Because if we don’t sacrifice a part of our innocence to know this is happening, they have no hope, because we are the adults, we are the ones who will...if anyone’s going to save them, it is going to be the adults, that have the power and the influence and the ability. But if we don’t know about it, we are not going to save them. But to know about it, you must sacrifice some of your innocence. And so that’s what we ask people to do: sacrifice some of your innocence, listen to this show, go to our website, learn about trafficking. It’s the fastest growing criminal enterprise on earth. Two million children, and more, are being sold for sex, over ten million children sold for labor. Add all the adults, we’re on a 30-40 million range. I mean, wake up! Help them out! But it does require a sacrifice of innocence.     Mark: So, back to the question at hand, did you actually have, have you had a sit-down, “Ok, let me talk to you about this, son”? Like, let me ask it this way: have your kids seen the documentary? Tim: Here’s my policy and my wife’s, I mean, every kid is an individual, right. Every kid you treat differently, because it is not a ‘one size fits all’ solution to raising kids. Mark: You have how many? Tim: I have six kids. Mark: That’s awesome! Tim: So, our kind of general policy, guideline on the documentary, which is ‘The Abolitionists’ documentary, which films my team going into different countries and helping the police infiltrate trafficking rings and so forth... Mark: Catching you soliciting pimps for underaged girls. Tim: Right. Mark: Asking “Hey, will she do this, will she do that?” Tim: Oh, yeah. Mark: Your kids have to hear you saying that. Tim: My kids are hearing that, yeah. So, what we’ve decided is, generally speaking, if this particular video or this particular documentary includes children, who are being sold, who are, say, 12 years old, then I’m going to let my 12-year-old watch it. And that is because I think it’s important for him to see what he has and what someone else doesn’t have. “Someone your age is being trafficked. You get to play football; they are being sold for sex.” And, I think it’s important for kids to recognize what they have, and then it instills in them a sense of responsibility: “How can I help that kid, who doesn’t get to play football? What can I do?” And it makes them aware of the world and aware of what’s happening. So, that is kind of how we deal with it. And then again I let them watch it, I don’t rehash it with them, I don’t bring it up too much, at least graphically.           Mark: Yeah. Tim: I let their mind stop them where it needs to stop. Mark: Smart. I like that principle that you said with adults, with kids, with everyone - they will go to a point that they are ready to go to.   Tim: Right. But here’s the point that I was making too - once you are an adult and you have real influence to help, it changes a bit in my mind, right.     Mark: Especially if you are a judge. Tim: Especially if you are a judge. I don’t want it to stop where your mind wants it to stop. And this is our job at Slave Stealer podcast and other places, other people’s responsibility, who are in the know-how, who have seen it, you’ve got to say “No!” No, I’m not going to let you stop. I am not going to let you shake your head and walk out of the kitchen. I’m going to make you stay until your mind grasps this enough to where you are going to act. And that’s the problem, is people hit that point where their brain wants them to stop, and they shake their head and walk away. We can’t have that. If we do that, these kids will not be liberated.        Mark: If that happens in 1860, you have still got millions of slaves in the South. Tim: Absolutely! Mark: Because we have talked about it. Tim: Absolutely. That’s why, because people shook their head and walked out of the kitchen. Mark: Yeah. You have got to show it to them. There are so many questions - I’m trying to think of a logical order here. You talked about it with your father-in-law, and we are not talking about 17 ½-year-old girls.    Tim: Right. Mark: We are talking about kids that are groomed, And, maybe.. let’s define the term. We kind of need to have like a trafficking glossary on our site. But grooming, and, maybe in the case of Lady, that we talked about - that’s when you explained it to me, you know, when I was going to go be a scoutmaster. I had to go through the whole ‘how to identify a perv’, right, and one of the terms they used was grooming. And they’re like, “Well, when you prepare a child for…” whatever. But you really broke it down for me in the case of this 11-year old virgin, who was sold to you in Columbia. I was there watching, she was a virgin. Tim: Right Mark: However, she knew exactly what was going to go down. Tim: Right.. Mark: What do they do to groom a child and how were you made aware of it? Like, give me how you came to that knowledge. Because this episode is kind of about you and the topic. Tim: So I came to the knowledge the only way I think anyone can, and that is experiencing it firsthand. For me, that was going undercover, pretending to be someone, who is interested in that black market, and getting into that market, becoming a player in that market. So, in the case of this little girl, who they were calling ‘Lady’ - and that surely wasn’t her real name, it was a name the traffickers gave her - in that case, we were pretending to be solicitors of child sex. We were working with the Colombian police pretending to be Americans, who travel to Colombia to engage in sex with children. And what had happened in this case, because we were working in that capacity and because we presented ourselves as wealthy Americans, I hinted to the trafficker that we would be interested in sharing profits and investing in his trafficking business. The reason we did that was because that all of a sudden, if they believe us, that pushes them to open their books and open their business and explain the business plan. And that’s how we learn how they do this. I would say things like, ”Look, I could probably get you a million dollar investment in this, but I need to know how it works; I need to know how you get these kids; I want to know you maintain the kids, how you groom and prepare them,” and so on and so forth. And the guy was more than happy to tell me what he does. Mark: I have a photograph of your hands around this little pattern napkin. It was like a napkin business plan...     Tim: Sure, yeah. Mark: Of a sex hotel for kids. Tim: That’s right. Mark: I have a picture of that. I’ll post it, because it is so disturbing when you realize what those numbers represent, volume and quantity and velocity of children and child rape.    Tim: Yeah, it was the dirtiest, most evil business plan that anyone could ever dream up. Mark: Yeah. Tim: ..on that napkin. That’s right. Mark: I’ll post that. Tim: And that was like our third or fourth discussion about how their business operations work. So, what they explained to me was, “Look, it’s easy to get the kids. You find poor families.” You don’t want to do a hard kidnapping, you know like the movie ‘Taken’. Does that happen? Yes. Is that the likely scenario? No. Why? Because you kidnap a kid, a hard kidnapping - meaning go into their house, like what happened with Elizabeth Smart, go into the house, pull them out. Well, you are going to kick up a lot of dust around you. Why do that if you are a trafficker if you can instead make it a peaceful kidnapping. Not peaceful for the child, right.          Mark: Yeah. Tim: Hell for the child, peaceful for the trafficker. In other words, they can kind of do this without fearing much consequence. So, what they do is they go to poor families, and these guys had actually hired or were working with, contracting with, a beauty queen in Cartagena. She had won a pageant, a beauty pageant. So, kind of people knew who she was; she had been on the news, she showed up in music videos, and so people knew who she was. So, they walk into the house with this beauty queen, and they say, “Look, look at this beautiful woman. She doesn’t have a worry in the world. She is paid, she is wealthy, she is beautiful, she is famous.” And then they point to the 9-year old daughter, and say, “we focus” - they told us “9 years old is where we start”. And they say to the mother and father: “Your 9-year-old daughter is just as beautiful as this girl; we just got to train her. We can train her, and she can become a model and an actress.” And they fill the parents with all sorts of dreams that they never believed were possible for their child. And certainly this is legitimate, because they are looking at the star, who is in their living room saying, “I can do this for you. And we’re going to give you a scholarship. You can come to our school and learn how to be a model for free.” At that point, they bring them into the modeling school, and they teach them some things. And when they get comfortable, they say, “Now you are going to watch this video.” And the video will be pornography. “This is part of being an actress, it’s part of…you need to understand this world.” And when kids are at that age - nine, ten, eleven - their minds are still developing and forming, and if someone tells you this is right, this is right, this is right, eventually your mind develops as a 9- or 10-year old into believing, “Ok, this is right, this is right.” And so they start seeing that. We had evidence that some of them were being drugged, you know, threatened: “If you go back and tell your parents that we are doing these things, you are going to be in big trouble.” And again, kids are very… Elizabeth Smart, when we get her on the show, she can talk about this, where a police officer walked up to her, while she was in captivity, and said “Are you Elizabeth Smart?”. I mean that, it would have been over! Mark: Yeah. Tim: And she said, “I am not. I am not Elizabeth Smart.” Because she was scared to death because they, her captors, had told her, “If you ever reveal who you are, we will kill your sister, and your family.” And as Elizabeth tells it, everything they had told her they are going to do to her, they did it. They told her they are going to rape her, and they did it. They told her they are doing this particular thing - sex acts - and they did it. They told her they’d chain her up, and they did it. So, when they told her that they are going to kill her parents if she reveals who she is, why would a 14-year-old not believe that they are going to do it?                        Mark: They’ve got all power. Tim: All power. And she has received criticism for that, you know, like, “Why didn’t you run away? Did you want to be there?”, you know... People just can’t comprehend how the mind of a child works. And that’s what these kids go through - they are scared into not revealing what is really going on. So, they groom them, and they said it, it will be a year and a half, or more, while they are grooming them, all under the hospices of this modeling school. And of course they are being trained to be models as well, and then eventually they say, “Ok, so this is your test. You are going to this party on this island, and these men are going to come from America, and you are going to do the things that you have seen being done in the pornography videos, and do whatever they want.” In a nutshell, that is how it works. I mean, that is how it works, that is the reality. Mark: And variations of. Tim: And variations of that.   Mark: So, they can do everything up until the point that she is not a virgin to claim... Tim: Right. Mark: “Hey, it is a virgin.” Tim: And they can, and they want to do this because their virgins are premium, right.  Already, a child, in most black markets, a child will go for about a double or more than double of what an adult prostitute will go for. But then, if that child is also a virgin, then it’s quadruple, or more of that price. So, it’s a premium to sell a virgin child. Mark: Wow...Give me, you’ve talked about it - like pulling people’s blinders off, and those moments where people are opened up, and the one with I think your father-in-law, who gets it now - that was pretty dramatic. What about..give me another one. You don’t have to name names, I just like hearing about people’s response. Are there any high profiles that you are allowed to share, that, maybe change the name, change the whatever? Somebody that you have shocked, that should have known?        Tim: Yeah. I was in the office, probably a year or two ago, of a governor of a certain state. We were explaining who we were and what we did, and he was absolutely shocked. And, kudos to him for being honest, saying, “Wait, wait, wait, what?! There is how many kids? There is how many kids being hurt and trafficked in the world? And what does that mean? They do what?!” He didn’t know, he didn’t know anything! And again, I’m not blaming him for not knowing. It is not something you go seek out, right? It is not something that your advisors seek out to tell you. It is hard to talk about. And I don’t know that you know the answer - why aren’t we talking about it more? Why, why, why, why? I really believe because it is that.. it is so dark a topic. It is not even...you know, slavery in the nineteenth century - it was politically divisive. It was a political nightmare to get involved: go back to the Lincoln-Douglas debates and everything. I mean, it was a divisive and a political issue. This is not even a political issue. There is nobody standing on the side of the pedophiles - well there are some: NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, which deserves its own show someday.         Mark: Do they have a logo? Tim: Well, there are all sorts of different..Look them up: nambla.org. Mark: Is that weird? Tim: You might have cops knocking on your door tonight. Mark: That is what I am saying. Tim: No, no, no, you won’t. You can look them up. Mark: What are the pop-up ads I am getting after that? Tim: Yeah, be careful when you go: nambla.org. I mean, it is a legitimate organization, legitimate in terms of legality, right. And, they are just a group that is pushing for a.. Mark: Oh hell! Tim: What did you find? You got...I told you to be careful when you go to that... Mark: No, it is not...and luckily, I’ve retained that innocence: I have never seen child pornography. It is a cartoon on the front their page - it is an adult asking a little boy, “What can I do to make you happy?” And the little boy says, “I like hugs.” Tim: Boom! And that’s their whole message. If you go into...When I was an agent, I would go all into it and learn about it, what they believe in. And they actually talk about how kids, psychologically and emotionally, need sexual healing and sexual exposure from adults. And why not adults, who know what they are doing? And so they make it sound as though the kid wants to be hugged, the kid wants to be touched. Why is it so bad? And they bring up science, where they show that children are sexual beings based on this story and that. Of course, they are human beings! Their sexuality is attached to everybody; we are born with it. But that doesn’t mean you are ready to bring it out and force it on a child, because that’s what you would be really doing, forcing it on a child. Their brains aren’t developed to the point where they can make those kind of decisions, or comprehend the kind of consequences of that activity. I mean it destroys...I’ve seen kids destroyed over this. And here they are saying they just want to hug, “Just hug me, that is all I want.”      Mark: Oh, here’s the other one, right. They are just headlines and we’re not going to go off on NAMBLA forever, because it does deserve its own show. Maybe we bring one of these idiots in.   Tim: Yeah, bring them in, let them take it. Mark: Or, we bring in some of the people they are attacking. And I thought of this this morning, ok. I’ll read a couple headlines: ‘When Labor Loved Liberty (And Before They Changed Their Minds)’ about the labor unions formally supporting..whatever. ‘Remembering Michael Jackson’, and they’ve got the old black version of Michael, ‘Remembering a Lover of Boys’, ‘Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons’, ‘The Non-Wisdom of Crowds: Defender of Anonymous Outraged by our Lack of Passivity’. Now, this one’s interesting: ‘Hipster Vigilantism and the New Populist Attack on Free Speech’. That is what they are calling it: speech, right. And then, they say ‘Anonymous Decidedly Illiberal Campaign to Silence Us’. Dude, is Anonymous getting on these guys, because they would be an awesome ally.   Tim: I don’t know, but let’s check, let’s look into it - let’s absolutely look into it. But these guys have conventions; it’s a political movement to legalize this kind of behavior. Mark: They called Oprah a liar, by the way. Tim: And so... Mark: Saying she wasn’t, she wasn’t molested as a child. Ok, I’m off on NAMBLA. Tim: Ok. So, we’ll go back talking more about that, but the point is, that, except for these few total whackjobs, who think that this is a healthy thing for children, it is really just obviously serving their own selfish lust and pleasure and evil. Dark, dark souls...But, for the most part, this is not a political issue, right, it is not a political issue. Everyone will be on the side of solving this. So, what is the obstruction? It is simply, “I don’t want to know; I don’t want to see it.” It’s the ostrich, the ostrich effect, sticking our head in the sand: “I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to...I have kids, grandkids. I can’t think about it.” And that’s where we have to make the change, that’s where we have to convert people to look at it.    Mark: What are the more offensive things that people have said to you? Maybe on purpose or not on purpose. I don’t need the top three, because it’s hard to think in superlatives, but give me five offensive things people have said to Tim Ballard, unknowingly or knowingly.   Tim: Offensive, in terms of just this topic in general? Mark: Yeah, that you’re like, “I used to respect you three minutes ago, before that came out your mouth.” Tim:I think the one time I can remember where I got the most offended...and frankly, you actually just did it to me earlier today, accidentally. I wasn’t so mad. Mark: Oh, when I wondered if you would turn into a perv by looking at... Tim: Yeah, it was so...I felt really bad because... Mark: That wasn’t a personal attack, by the way. Tim: No, no no, it wasn’t. And I want to clear this up. I don’t have a whole lot of examples of people, who say things offensive in terms of why this should or shouldn’t be legal or illegal, right. I mean, I’ve had perpetrators during interrogations defended, you know. A guy named Ernst Luposchainsky, for example - you can look him up, we arrested him in Minnesota... And he was pretty, I mean he was offensive, but I mean, geez, he was just such a joke. You are looking at this guy and you are almost, almost...somewhere in between laughter and vomit. You know, you are just like: “Are you serious? You are saying this?” You know, but he would talk about like the benefits of child pornography and how it helps the poor kids. “These kids get paid, they get paid for their sexual services, and we are helping them, we are helping their families.” He would talk about the tiger and the meat analogy. I remember we talked about, and this is all during his interrogation, where he would say, “Look, you have got to feed the tiger meat. If you don’t feed the tiger meat, he will eventually attack human beings.” So, he is actually saying, “Children are being raped, that’s horrible! Now, a consensual sex with a child, that is a different story. But, children are being raped against their will, I’m against that. Oh, I’m so against that!” You know, he would say...       Mark: Just for the record, you were quoting him on the “consensual sex is a different story”? Tim: Yes. Mark: Ok, just making sure it wasn’t like... Tim: Yes, quoting. Mark: You, parenthetically saying “Hey, consensual sex...” Tim: I’m sure some out there would love to misquote me on that and accuse me. So, the tiger and the meat, right. “You have got to feed the tiger meat, you have got to feed the tiger meat, and then he will never rape the kids.” And the meat is child porngraphy. “Make it legal. Let them look at it, because then they will just look at it, and then they will get satisfied and the kids will be safe.” Mark: Oh, yeah, totally! Tim: Because it doesn’t, it certainly doesn’t fuel your evil passion by looking at it, right? Like for example, a man who watches pornography, he never watches pornography with an int to actually engage in sex with a woman. He just watches it for, you know, for the pleasure in itself. Yeah...baloney! Any dude, who watched porn will tell you, right, “I would like to translate this to my bedroom,” right. It is no different with child pornographers. They are looking at this, and they want to act out. So it is just the opposite - you are fueling the fire, not putting it out. But, I mean, that was offensive. And, by the way, that Ernst Lupochainsky case, we got to do a show sometime on that. That was the hardest case I have ever did. In the middle of that interview, ok, while he was telling me all this stuff, he would not break, he would not break, he would not break. So, what I had to do...because he believed that all men were closet pedophiles, he just believed that story... Mark: I love this story. Tim: He just believed that. It was his way to justify his own feelings, of course. But this puritanical society - that is what he called it - has stopped the natural flow of love between a man and young, little girls. But on this show, I have got to read...he had this postmortem message he put on all his child porn collection. We will prep and I will read his message.      Mark: Oh my gosh. Tim: It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable. But the point I am making here is, I had to go undercover - this is just a teaser - I had to go undercover... Mark: Don’t blow it, because I know the punchline, and it is unreal. Tim: Yeah..as myself. So, I pushed my buddy away, the other agent, who was interviewing the guy. I was still wired up undercover, you know, and I said, “Hey, listen man, listen Ernst, help me out. I mean you are right. Reading your stuff - it makes me trust you. I have got to look at this stuff all day long. What do you think that does to me? It makes me want that. But there is no one I can talk to. Can you talk to me? Can you help me?” Sure enough, his eyes just light up. He believed it! I couldn’t believe he bought into it. I was...I was...It is one thing when I am Brian Black, you know, or I’m some alias in an undercover operative.          Mark: That is a cute name. Did you make that one up? Tim: That was the name that I used to use, yeah...Brian Black. So, here I was, Tim Ballard, U.S. agent/pedophile. So it was a totally different thing. I was myself, and that went on for...and then you know, I reported it to my supervisors; they loved it. And that kept on for at least a month, until we could get all the information out of this guy we possibly could about his contacts and networks. And he opened up to me, thinking he was helping me enter into, you know, induct me into the beautiful world of pedophilia. So, someday we’ll do that story, because that is an amazing story. The guy is still in jail.     Mark: Good. Tim: So, that is kind of somewhat offensive, but the time I blew up...the sweetest lady on earth - she was, she was just...Lived down the street, sweet kind lady, and I was working in child porn cases, kind of mad - you know you’re just mad a lot, thinking about it. And she said to me, “So, how many agents, you know, end up…?” And again, the same thing you just said, but I didn’t blow up at you.    Mark: Good grief! I feel like such a schmuck, especially in context of the story you have just told me. Tim: Yeah, it was the first time... Mark: Because I know you are not susceptible to that. Tim: Right. And, I would honestly argue that unless you are predisposed and you enter the child crimes group so that you could access it, I think it is just the opposite. And, you know, she said, “So, how many end up pedophiles themselves, being exposed to this?” Mark: Legit question! Tim: Yeah...I mean it sounds like a legit question, unless when you are in it, you are like “Wait, whoa, whoa.” Yeah so, by the hundredth time I am watching a child scream in pain, by that time I am like, “I am digging this.” But, I went off, I went crazy. I said, “Do you think it is that?! Or maybe it is, ‘I can’t believe I have to watch this again! I can’t believe I have to subject myself again to this video, and my stomach is punched again and again and again.” It was so bothersome to me, because it is just the opposite of what she was saying. It is like, I have got to endure this. It is like saying this, here is a good analogy: someone who has been doing chemotherapy for a year, right, and every three months they got to go get another dose of chemo. It is like someone saying, “So, how many cancer patients become addicted to chemo? Even after the cancer is done, they still take chemo just because they are addicted to it?” Right?! That is analogous right there. Mark: Yeah... Tim: Ok? And, it is just like, “Wow, wow,” you know, it killed me. I get it, but it was just, it is...What they don’t understand is the potency of this. It is not! What they think is, she was probably still thinking 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds. I was like, are you kidding me?! It is not what we are talking about! If there is a 16-year old in a child porn video, we wouldn’t even prosecute that, unless you absolutely knew it was a 16-year-old, in like specific cases where, you know, uncles taking pictures or something. Mark:Yeah. Tim: But otherwise, you wouldn’t. You would be like “Eh...” If you can’t tell...The majority of the child porn cases we prosecuted: 5 years old, 7 years old, 10 years old, that range, right. I know, it’s just... it is just things the vast majority don’t have to see, and I don’t want them to see it. Mark: Yeah. Tim: I don’t want them to see it. But they need to know it is happening, so that they can be part of the solution. Mark: On that same thought of things that people unintentionally say that are offensive, how about this? And I have got this one before, even with my little bit of involvement: “Well, she looks like she wants it.” Tim: Oh, yeah...I get that quite a bit. In fact, right in our documentary, in “The Abolitionists”. Mark: Yeah! Tim: I have heard a couple of people say that. In an early screening that happened, and my wife who was in the room,  it was a very early screening, we brought some kind of influential people in to watch. Mark: I was there! Tim: Oh, right! You were there. That’s right! Mark: I was sitting by your wife. Tim: You were there. A sweet lady - I think you know her, I think you know who she is - totally innocent, you know, she just...she said, “Can’t you show like a little darker side to this, so that people know? Can’t you show us some kids who are not looking like they want to be here?” And, if you remember my wife, she’s like... Mark: Oh yeah. Tim: “Alright! This is tragic, what is happening to these kids! This isn’t a scripted film, this isn’t - we can’t make this up. This is real, and it is their hell. And just because you can’t see it, because you are not the spirit inside of that body,”... know, my wife just… bless her heart, she went crazy.   Mark: She is not outspoken. Tim: No. Mark: Right? For her to... Tim: For her to do that... it touched a nerve. Mark: Yeah.. Tim: And again, back to the misconceptions. Are you going to find cases of kids chained up and locked in closets? Absolutely, you are going to find that! The vast majority, the vast majority? No, that is not what it looks like. And in the documentary - most people get it, it is not usually a big problem - but in the documentary, I mean, you are watching the filmmakers put the ages of the kids - of course cover their identities - but they put their ages, their numbers like over their blurred faces. And so you are watching this 12-year old-girl, it says twelve, you know, and I remember that little girl, I remember that she actually had fear in her eyes. But if you weren’t looking straight into her eyes, she did walk into the party, and she knew what was going to happen to her.   Mark: And she was dressed like a 21-year-old prostitute. Maybe not her, but some of the others. Tim: Some of them were, that one wasn’t, but some of them absolutely... This little girl was wearing like long basketball shorts and a white t-shirt, and you will see that in the documentary. But others were, the 12-year-olds...    Mark: They are not picking their outfit here. Tim: Right, right. Mark: For the most part. Tim: And they are walking in and people say, “Looks like they want to do that! They want to do it! Look at, they... No one is forcing them to walk in.” And again back to Elizabeth Smart. When you will bring her on the show, we can talk to her about it, and she...If you thought Catherine, my wife, got passionate, wait until Elizabeth answers that question. And she says, because they bring it u, she had plenty of opportunities, in theory, to run. She did. She was in public areas, policeman came up to her, right, but what they don’t understand is trafficking, slavery, so much of slavery is mental. These traffickers enslave these kids mentally, emotionally, not just physically. In fact, they don’t want it; if they can get away with not enslaving them physically, all the better. Remember, they don’t want to kick up a lot of dust around them. So, if they can figure out how to enslave them mentally and emotionally, that is always the first choice, and they do it by the grooming process that we described earlier. They groom them, and then they control them. They control them! And this is why the rehab part is so important, because you have got to undo the damage, and that doesn’t happen overnight. It is a long process. I don’t know, I mean, I have talked to a lot of victims of trafficking, who are adults now and have families of their own, and they have told me, “You know, you don’t ever fully, fully heal.” I mean, there is always something there you have got to battle. And that is what happens, that is why when Elizabeth’s father runs to her, she still denies who she is for a second, and then she opens up. Because it is like a spell, and if you haven’t been through it - and I haven’t, so I can’t fully comprehend it, but I’ve been around it enough to know that you can’t comprehend it, unless it has happened to you. And a child’s mind is not like an adult’s mind. Children don’t think like adults think. Their minds are at different levels of development, they don’t have a lot of experience, they don’t understand the consequences like adults can and do. And so, it is not so difficult for the traffickers to play those mind games, warp them, brainwash them, and make them slaves.      Mark: Well, I think that...we’ll get into, I think, in shows down the road, we’ll have Throwback Thursdays. We’ll go revisit missions and do things, but I feel like that can give our listeners a little bit of insight into your passion, your feeling for what it is you do and how it affects your life. It is not a job you leave at the door, as you are hearing. And so if you have any parting shots along the lines of ‘Here’s Tim’, ‘Get to know Tim’, let’s go and leave our listeners with that.    Tim: You know I...I’d say this that I understand completely. We are talking about awareness, we are talking about people’s ability to see this problem. And I can’t sit back and judge and say, “Come on, open your eyes, open your eyes!” I was the worst of everybody; it was right before me and I was denying. I was denying it. I didn’t want to do it. It took me a long time to say yes, and even after I said yes, I was very apprehensive about how far I would go in this. So, I get it. It is a hard barrier to get around. And even when it is in front of you almost...you know, and then, when it is not in front you, of course, it is sometimes near impossible to get around. So, I get it, I get it, but I also understand that when you see it, when you allow yourself to open up to it, you become converted. And part of that I think is from God. I think God, more than anybody, wants these children liberated. I think he weeps more than anybody for these kids. So, if he can find an adult, who is willing to open their mind enough and not walk out of the room, he will help convert you, and put that passion into you, fill you with his spirit, and call you. He will call anybody, if you are going to help save his kids. And I just want people to go through the same conversion that I went through. I am kind of a missionary for trafficking, right. I mean, I am trying to evangelize here and get people converted to the cause, because that is who I am. I have been converted to the cause. And it hurt!        Mark: The cause of freedom. Tim: The cause of freedom. But it hurts to be converted, because you must leave something at the door, and that is your innocence. You must leave it. And who wants to give that up? But you must do that. You must make that sacrifice. And it hurts, and you cry, and you have moments that are embarrassing - and we’ll get into some of these. There were times, when I was like a child in my wife’s arms weeping and she is holding me, and I am just shaking. Still happens to me... I used to not talk about it, but I just talk about it now. It hurts, it hurts to get into this cause, because the cause of freedom requires you to fight evil, and evil hurts. But what we want to do here on this show is make converts, because I know this: converts to this cause equals liberty to children. And what greater thing can we do than bring liberty to children?   Mark: Thank you. And, because your last words were so good, I’ll sign off for you from OUR headquarters. Good night!    

This week, we have a brief discussion about how third party ad networks affect performance on news sites before talking with Sophie Shepherd. Sophie is a Senior Designer at Ushahidi, a non-profit software company that develops free and open-source products for information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping. We discussed the challenges of designing for international users with minimal data speed, how Ushahidi brings data and information to regions with nearly no connection, designing with task completion in mind, and more. ##Show Links: Sophie Shepherd Follow Sophie on Twitter Ushahidi Lara Hogan - A List Apart - Showing Performance Global Mobile Book Eric Meyer Crisis Design Rust Belt Refresh ##Transcript Katie: Welcome. You're listening to Episode 8 of The Path to Performance, the podcast dedicated to everyone to make the web faster. I am your host, Katie Kovalcin. Tim: And I'm your other host, Tim Kadlec and yeah, you nailed it; this is Episode 8. Well done! Katie: I was like, oh yeah, I totally know which episode it is. Wait: no, I don't. This is Episode 8. Tim: I mean, it's understandable; the numbers are getting higher, it's getting harder and harder. Katie: Totally out of control it's on more than one hand now! Tim: Yeah, once you've thrown that second hand, things get really complicated. It gets worse when you have to start taking off the socks and using your toes as well! That's where I always get hung up! Katie: You can wear flip-flops and then you don't have to worry about it. Tim: True, true. Katie: How are you, Tim? Tim: I'm doing OK; I'm actually wearing flip-flops right now! Yeah, I am! Katie: It's warm in Wisconsin? Tim: It is warm, for once. Yeah, I'm doing good; enjoying my day. And you? Katie: I'm good as well. The sun is shining here, which is a very rare thing in Ohio this summer and I feel like I have been whining about it for so long but today, I'm not whining. Tim: That's good! That's good! I'm guessing, we could maybe one of these times maybe we'll have an episode where we just kind of whine all the way through, but otherwise I think people probably enjoy the non-whining better. Katie: We can just have a bummer episode! Tim: Yeah, just a downer of an episode where we just air all our grievances about everything… Katie: We just talk in emo voice, just like…mwww…yeah, the web does actually kinda suuuuck… Tim: Yeah, exactly! I think this goes over well, I think this is maybe like a special Christmas edition. Katie: That is a really good idea. Tim: Right in time for the holidays. Katie: Christmas Bummer Episode! Tim: This is brilliant. That has to happen; I'm writing this down. Anyway, but glad to hear you're doing good now on this totally not Christmas at all episode. That's good. Katie: Yeah, on this summer-sunshine flip-flop fun-time episode! Tim: Yay! Katie: So, on the note of cool things, there's this episode from the Washington Post where in kind of a similar fashion, I know we talked a couple of months ago about Vox sort of declaring performance bankruptcy, Washington Post kinda did the same thing and talked about in an article the other day and that was pretty cool. They mentioned it sort of being in response to the instant articles and talking about just ads on news sites generally kind of sucky for performance, but I really liked this quite that it ended on that we have very little control over ads that load late or slowly but we wanted to make the core use experience as solid as possible because that is what we have control over and that's kind of a cool way to think about performance, just focusing on making good the core part that you do have control over. Tim: Yeah, and I think that's just generally awesome advice for anybody, because the ad work stuff comes up a lot and you have very little control over those third party ad networks and unfortunately a lot of them are super-slow right now but also essential for business but I like that they made the clear distinction between their core experience and understanding that the ads is just something you're going to have to tack on afterwards but mitigate the issues as much as possible. I think that's just really solid advice for any publisher. Katie: Yeah, absolutely. It's a nice article, it's a quick read; I recommend giving that a little skim or browse. Tim: Definitely. And then of course, Lara Hogan, who has made a habit out of writing good things over and over and over again or providing good performance advice in general, she wrote a post for A List Apart about showing performance; basically getting into some of the things she talked about way back in Episode 1 with us and also in her book about the importance of making performance visual: going into the dashboards and things like that, that they have up at Etsy and making sure that people can actually see the difference in performance. Katie: Yeah, she tweeted a little quick video a while ago and it might actually be in that article, I haven't had a chance to read it yet; it's on my to-do list but she posted a video of their video systems and it's really cool, it's really awesome to see that. Did I tell you that Lara, she talks about donuts all the time and donuts being her reward for good performance, achievements, good things like that, and when I saw Lara in New York a couple weeks ago, she took me to The Donut Spot that's in her neighborhood and I was so excited! Tim: Yeah, you told me. She's never taken me to The Donut Spot. I'm a little disappointed. I'm excited for you though: that sounds really cool. That's kind of… Katie: You know what? It was a really good donut because she says she's not a fan of the hipster donuts with a bunch of stupid toppings like cereal and candy bars and crap. Tim: Like the voodoo donuts thing in Portland? Katie: Yeah. These are just some straight-up home-town donuts in Brooklyn; I guess not really home-town but they were good! Tim: That's good. This is just like plain glazed? I want to know how far down the rabbit hole you went. Katie: We got banana…no, not banana: they were like custard-filled ones with the chocolate icing. I'm not a donut expert but those good ones! Tim: Gotcha, OK. That's a safe choice. Katie: Not the white sugary whipped cream-filled, the kind of yellowy-custard cream-filled ones; those are good ones. I don't know the distinction: is one cream and one custard? Is one icing and one cream? I don't know. Tim: I think it's usually like an icing and cream thing. Depending on where you go, it's almost like pure frosting is what it tastes like you're eating… Katie: Yeah, like you bite in and you're just like, oh my… Tim: Yeah, it's like there's frosting on the outside of the donut and frosting shoved down the inside as well and you just feel the cavities forming as you're eating them. It's great. It's a really good experience. But that's good. No, I did not…you did tell me this and that's very awesome, very cool. It's kinda like… Katie: Sorry; I'm obviously still thinking about that. Tim: I don't blame you. Katie: It was an experience. But, back to today's episode! We are talking to Sophie Shepherd and the big reason we wanted to get Sophie on here is not only because she's an awesome designer but because she has experience with working on products that are primarily used in developing countries that typically have the less than ideal device scenarios that we kind of always talk about in theory but she has some really great insight on talking a bout it in practice and actually designing for those devices and scenarios so it's going to be really interesting. Tim: Yeah, it'll be a nice fresh take, a different perspective than we usually get. Very cool. Katie: Cool. Well, let's go hear from Sophie. Katie: And we're back with Sophie Shepherd from Ushahidi. Sophie; can you tell us a little bit about Ushahidi and what exactly that is? Sophie: Sure. So, the what exactly it is, it's a Swahili word that means "Testimony". A lot of people are like, "Usha-what?" so it's not English so don't feel bad if you can't say it. And the company was founded in 2008 in Kenya so in 2008 what was happening in Kenya. there was an election that was fairly corrupt and there was quite a bit of violence broke out and some bloggers who were in Kenya and living in Kenya realized that they needed to do something to help out as well as just writing about what was happening, so they made a product in which people could submit reports of different places where the election was happening, different polling stations and this way they could say, there's been violence here, someone was killed here or this is a safe place where you can go to vote, or there's fraud happening. And what Ushahidi does is it takes all of these different reports and collects them into one place and provides a list and a map for them. So that's how it was founded; it's now a number of products but the name of our main platform is still Ushahidi and the purpose of it is still too collect data, crowd-source data. It's oftentimes gets mapped but isn't necessarily, we're re-doing the platform right now so that it's not only map data; it can really be anything that users submit. Katie: Awesome. So, spoiler alert, I know Sophie really well so I know the details of what she does and what really struck me and why I wanted to get her on the podcast so bad is because you deal a lot with users that are in places that have really poor connectivity and the products that you're designing are really crucial information that they need to get to. Can you talk a little bit about all of that and the challenges that you face when designing for that? Sophie: Sure. So, I think something that's really interesting is that it's not only poor connectivity but the kind of contexts in which people are using our products are unique. Not exclusively, but oftentimes they're used in crisis situations, so people don't have a whole lot of time. A lot of the time, the power could be down or internet could be down, so it's not only we have to think about connectivity but also ways that people are submitting information. This has been the first project I've worked on where it's not just, when we talk about performance, it's not just people needing to load something fast but it's about access and accessibility so, built into our product is people can anonymously text stuff in and that'll become a part of our system so it's really thinking about this whole ecosystem of access and ways of submitting information rather than just a website. Katie: Can you talk a little bit about what that means exactly, more than just a website? How else are you working around those connectivity and accessibility issues? Sophie: Yes, well, Ushahidi as a whole, not only with our platform but we have a lot of other companies that have spun out from the product itself, so there's a company Brick which is really, really awesome. It was founded by someone who was also a founder in Ushahidi and they make wifi devices that are super-rugged; they work off 3G connections so you can take those anywhere. We were in Kenya and they have all these attachments so it can be solar-powered wifi, so we had a group meeting in Kenya and we were all accessing the internet in the middle of nowhere on a beach from this device we had. So, it's thinking more about getting people information. Similarly we do a lot with SMS so if someone only has a phone they can text in a report or receive a response saying, OK, this has been confirmed, through their phone. Tim: This is fascinating stuff. I always think it's very interesting to hear the perspective outside of what we're used to in the little bubble that we get to live in here in the United States tech industry. This is taking everything in terms of the importance of building something that is going to work on different devices and the importance of building something that's going to perform well and this is really scaling up the importance of doing that, the vitality of doing that from just business metrics to, like you're saying, people's lives at stake in some of these cases. I'm curious; you mentioned being in Kenya and using those devices to get access. You can't obviously develop all the time in Kenya, so how are you finding ways to get that experience here, when you're building stuff from the United States so that you're feeling what it's going to be like on those, a 2G or a 3G connection or whatever it happens to be? Sophie: It's definitely a challenge for me because not only am I working every day on a really good connection but I've never really not had that; maybe five years ago my connection was not as good as it was now but I think I've always been as far as connection speeds in the one per cent, but we have a really great user advocacy team at Ushahidi so this is not only thinking about performance and website metrics, but we have a whole team that is dedicated to making sure that our users are satisfied, listening to what their needs are and responding in that way and also helping them, because this is a product that then gets extended and they can download it and set up their own deployments to use the product so we have a team that works really closely with people who are actually using it, which is terrific because we get a lot of feedback through that. Tim: I was going to say, are some of the team members in Kenya? Sophie: Uh-huh. Yeah, we have one person in Kenya, one person in Canada and then we have as part of, we have a specific user testing wing that's in Kenya but what they do is, since they are so in touch with people who use this stuff all over the world, they're good at being able to not only test it in Kenya but test it elsewhere and talk to…we have a large group using this stuff in Nepal right now because of the earthquake so they're in touch with them, checking that everything's working OK, getting any feedback from them. Katie: Do you tend to look at what specific devices the majority of users in these areas are using and start building and testing there or how does that work out? What's the size of an iPhone, that tends to be our default? What devices are you really thinking about in those areas? Sophie: It's interesting because right now, we are in the midst of re-building this product and so a lot of the people out there who are using it right now are using Version 2 which is the older version and at this point I don't even know how many years old it is but it's fairly outdated. It still works really well but it's not responsive; it's hard, we've noticed that quite a lot of people are using it on a desktop but that's only because it doesn't work very well on a phone so it'll be really interesting, we're launching the new one which is fully responsive and a lot more modern in this way to see how people end up using it. But it's tough because we can't say, iPhone users use this because it's used really everywhere in the world so maybe if it's used in the US it is going to be on an iPhone more, whereas elsewhere, it's Android but we try to cast a really wide net so there's an Android app that will be used for collecting information, you can submit by SMS. The new version's going to be totally responsive so what we try to do is not really focus on one but make sure that everyone can use it. Katie: So, you've been working on a responsive re-design and everything we've talked about has been the poor connectivity and all of that. How has performance played into those decisions when building this site or the product again for this new version? Sophie: It's a continuous consideration and process of checks and balances. One thing is that, thinking about images: part of this new system is we're able to have people submit images as part of their reports so that's something that we still have not quite figured out how we should work with how to then deliver those back to people and also thinking about different JavaScript libraries that we're using. It's a constant balance, so I think we're still figuring it out. We've done quite a bit of user-testing but more UX user-testing but the application itself is not totally done, it hasn't been built yet, so I think that's to come in terms of optimizing how it's going to work exactly. But from the design and front-end, we've definitely been keeping things really light and really the only question that we have is how we're going to treat images. Tim: Is it primarily a matter of using them or not using them or is it a degree of compression in terms of getting them to a point where maybe they're a little pixilated and ugly but they're balanced: the trade-off is that they're going to perform well on those types of networks? What are you battling with, with the images? Sophie: Well, I think basically every single image that is ever going to be on the site is going to be submitted by a user, so we don't know exactly the sizes of images that are going to come in and then at what point we are then going to compress them or shrink them and how we're going to do that and then how they're going to then be delivered back out. Yeah. Tim: So it's getting a system in place for all the user-generated content? Sophie: Exactly, yes. Tim: Gotcha. OK. Katie: So, you talk a lot about style guides and patter libraries and Sophie I know that's how you like to design and work. What is that process looking like? Do you do testing as you go on designs and see how performing it is or how fast it's loading under those different circumstances? Can you just talk a little bit about your design thinking? Sophie: Yeah. What we have been doing is we did all the UX fairly separately, thinking about just user flows and how things were going to be laid out and how things should work and then we did some visual design and then we started combining these by building the pattern library, so we took out patterns from visual design and eventually we've just started building templates and designing in the browser because we have enough of these patterns to build upon and it's been really great; this is the first time that I've worked in this way and what I really love about it is that each of our patterns and components basically stand on their own so it's really easy to look at them and understand exactly where certain weights are coming from. By designing modularly, we can pull those out rather than seeing a page as a whole and not really understand what's causing what. Tim: In a prior episode, we were talking to Jeff Lembeck of Filament Group and he mentioned what he called the "Jank Tank" which is this big box of basically ugly, horrible, slow devices. Considering how wide the net you're spreading, do you have anything similar? Is there a Ushahidi Jank Tank that you guys go to? Sophie: There isn't, but I love that idea. Tim: Yeah, I think we were fans of that too. Sophie: Is it like…what does he mean exactly? Tim: The idea was having… Sophie; …lowest common denominator kind of devices? Time: Yeah, basically grabbing cheap devices or old devices and firing those up: things that are going to be maybe a few years old and are probably going to be a huge challenge to make things feel fluid and work well on those and you have those handy to test them out and see what honestly might be a more typical user would experience than the high end stuff. Sophie: Yeah, we don't have that here in the States; I feel bad calling it a Jank Tank because that's negative-sounding, but in the office in Kenya, they have…they all work in a building and there's quite a few tech companies that work in there and they have something like a Mobile Device Lab and I think it was sponsored by a mobile company there but I was there earlier in the year and it kind of blew my mind; I put a picture of it on Twitter that we can refer to in the Speaker Notes. But that was all of these phones that were phones that I hadn't even necessarily seen, that they don't sell in the States, and they're all used for testing so at some point probably now that I'm talking about it, I'm realizing we should do it sooner rather than later, they have a whole testing lab there that we can test this product on. Tim: Nice. A mobile device lab does admittedly sound a little bit more ??? serious. Katie: Everything that you're saying sounds like, just tying in that accessibility and performance are going hand in hand and it sounds like you've just learned a great deal of empathy in your time there. Is that true and has that influenced your design? Sophie: Yeah, definitely. I think something that has really changed in my mind is thinking about when doing the design, what actions are people going to want to take, so I think that goes with performance too: if we can only load this one button that says "submit a report" and skip all of the images then that's the most important thing, so, really thinking about where to guide people and what the most important and crucial actions are before loading and everything else, so as a designer that's been definitely something that, previously I was doing client work and it was like we had this long list of requirements that we had to fit in and now it's kind of re-assessing and re-prioritizing what requirements actually are and having different levels of this is the one thing they need to really use this app and then here's all of this other helpful stuff that could be called crucial but isn't actually life or death crucial. Katie: That's really interesting. Do you think that there's any way that, for those of us still working on client projects, to have those conversations with the client to try to be like, "no, really, but the marketing video isn't truly required"; exercises in priority and stuff: do you have any tips for paring down those requirements? Sophie: I think it's tough if your talking to a marketing person because they'd be like, "no, literally I'm going to die if I don't get this on there." Katie: And you're like, "no, literally, people are on our products like…" Sophie: Yeah. I think any time it's easier to say, "does this go above this in the priority list" people are willing to answer that question rather than either or. So, in general, communicating and deciding things I would recommend ordering rather than choosing people to sacrifice things. Tim: And it seems like that's clarified too in, I would guess one of the reasons why it works so well where you are is because that task, if you're looking at what the most important thing for the user to do is, it's so very clear and so very critical whereas on maybe on a more traditional thing where you're working with marketers or whatever, they may not have as clear a sense of, what is the ultimate purpose of this site? And then it becomes a lot harder to do the prioritization without that. Sophie: Yeah; it's funny because we're in the process right now of re-designing the company site as well as re-designing the product itself and it shouldn't be, because there's no life or death, but it's so much more complicated to prioritize stuff on the company site because there's so many different types of audiences and services that it needs to provide whereas on the app itself, it's pretty clear to say, what's the most important action for someone to take. Tim: Within the new site, do you still have to take into consideration a lot of the same sort of constraints in terms of the different devices and connectivity because that's who your audience is that you're marketing to, or are you marketing to a different group through the site? Sophie: Yeah, the site will be, well that's up for debate; that's I think what we're still trying to figure out. I think by default it's a good idea to not ever say, "oh well only people in the States with nice phones are going to look at this" just because that's a dangerous attitude to have, but it's possibly less of priority for the site itself. Tim: So, going back to prioritizing performance within the actual apps and stuff that you're doing: did you have set targets that you were looking at when you were working V3 of this? Were there hard-set goals; we are not going to go over this amount of weight or we are not going to take longer than this for the map of data to appear or anything like that? Sophie: Yeah, so we set a performance budget and we've set a few of them; we set one for the front-end so what we've done is build this pattern library and we have all of our, we're calling them "weight-outs" which are basically our different views within the app itself. So we had an initial goal for that, that we've met and then we set a separate one for the build itself and that's still in process, so hopefully we can get around that target. I like this too because instead of having one end-goal we can really check as we go. Tim: Yeah, it's nice to have it broken down like that. Can we ask what the targets are, just out of curiosity? Sophie: I can look them up but I don't know them right now. Tim: That's fine. Just curious. Was it in terms of the weight or is it a different sort of, more like an experience-focused metric or anything like that, that you're targeting? Sophie: Yeah, we did a weight and a load time. Tim: Gotcha. OK. Katie: It sounds like you've worked in some of the perceived performance thinking too when you're saying, what's the critical information to load first. Sophie: Yeah, for me as a designer, that's definitely something that I can relate to more and I think in some ways it's possibly more important. I think they work as a team but… Tim: I think it is. And I think that's…I think or I hope that that's what, within the performance community, the people who really that's what they do focus on, I think that that's where everything is starting to, we're starting to wake up to that and certainly to shift towards understanding that it really is about the experience and making sure that the critical things are coming in, whatever the top task, whatever the most important features are on the page or coming in and measuring those sorts of things, instead of this blind race to the finish that we've kind of had in the past. Sophie: Yeah. I'm curious to see how that thinking changes because I love the idea of a performance budget but I think sometimes it can be a little limiting and you wouldn't want to sacrifice certain things just to fit into the performance budget. Not limiting, but I think it's very concrete whereas it should be a fairly fluid depending on context of the site itself. Tim: Sure, yeah, it doesn't dictate what goes on; it's another consideration or it's part of another piece in the puzzle. Sophie: Right. At the same time, it's the easiest way to communicate goals. Tim: True. It's hard to without it having a hard set thing, it's very hard, yeah. Sophie: Yeah, until you have the design done, you can't say, OK, our goal is that this is going to load and then this is going to load this much later. It helps to have a number that everyone can refer back to. Katie: So, when you say for everyone to communicate, who is that? Is that between you and the developers? Is this something that your leadership is really that's close to their heart as well? Sophie: Yeah, I think when I said that it was more coming from my experience with client work, where you're using this number as a kind of tactic to force a client to decide on certain things. For us, since we're all working internally, I think definitely any…basically, everyone wants to see it be as fast as it possibly can, so we're all working towards the same thing. Katie: Is there ever a push-back to even like, "OK, now that we've hit that, let's try another goal that's even faster"? Sophie: Not yet, because we haven't launched it, but I wouldn't be surprised if we launch it and get certain feedback that it wasn't loading or it wasn't working quite right on something. I'm really curious to see once it's out there and people are using it, how people respond. Katie: Yeah, I'm really curious to see what metrics you find out from that. Tim: Did you make a distinction…there's the cutting the mustard approach that the BBC popularized which is the core experience goes to maybe older, less capable browsers/devices and the enhanced experience goes to everybody else. One of the things that that fails at, or that doesn't take into consideration which seems like it would be really important for Ushahidi is the situation where you have somebody is on a very nice device but the connectivity is really awful. Did you have to make any distinction between different experiences or do you just have one experience and that experience itself is extremely lightweight, no matter what the scenario is? Was that enough for you to accomplish or you needed to do? Sophie: Yeah, that's funny; we had our company retreat in Kenya so it was I think maybe about half, maybe a little less of our company is in the US so we all went there with our snazzy iPhones and still couldn't connect to anything and it really, I think in terms of empathy, made us realize: oh, wait a second. But in terms of yeah, I think we're just going to try to make it fast for everyone. We don't have a whole lot of enhancements for people on quicker systems yet. Katie: When you were in Kenya, were there any things that were especially awful to try to load, like you're used to just being part of your everyday life? I'm just curious. Sophie: I remember reading Twitter, on the Twitter app and everything loaded except for the pictures and it made you realize just how often people supplement their tweets with pictures; I remember getting really frustrated about it. Katie: That's interesting. Sophie: But I didn't even really try to do a lot of stuff because it really didn't look very well. Same thing on Instagram; it's like sometimes this progressive loading thing; I would rather it not load at all than, oh, I see all of these people posted great pictures that I can't look at. I'd rather not know than… Katie: Or like the tweets having fomo, oh, you had a joke and I can't see the punch-line! Sophie: Exactly! Katie: That's really interesting because when we're just designing here in a bubble it's like, "well I think that would be fine for you to just know that it's there but not see it" but then when you're actually using it, you're like: no, this sucks. Sophie: Yeah, it's like actively frustrating. Tim: How often do you get to Kenya? Sophie: I'm new to the company; I've only been here since the beginning of the year but I think they do a retreat every year but not necessarily always in Kenya; I think every other year it's in Kenya. And I think other people on the team, it depends, we'll do these what we call Hit Team Meetings because everyone is remote and then mini-teams will get together and all work together for a week so those have been all over the place since people live on opposite ends of the world, depending on who's meeting they usually choose a place that is fairly central for everyone to get to. Katie: We'll start to have a list of sites, Sophie, how much is this really crappy, wherever you end up going… Sophie: How long does this take? Katie: Look it up and tell me how much it sucks. Sophie: It is cool to have people on the team everywhere for that reason. Tim: Sure, I bet that gives you a really nice overall picture of a whole bunch of different landscapes from a technical perspective. Sophie: Yeah. Katie: I know, I didn't prepare a list of questions like I should have! Tim: It's all right, I'm actually having a lot of fun just going off the cuff on this, knowing almost nothing. I did a little bit of research and I had heard of Ushahidi from this big fat book about mobile on a global scale that was put out a couple of years ago. Sophie: That's cool. What was that book? Tim: It's called Global Mobile. It's six hundred pages and each chapter is written by a different author on a different topic and I think Ushahidi came up twice… Sophie: Oh, that's awesome. Tim: …in the book. Sophie: Do you know what they referenced or what it was…. Tim: One was just talking about how…I don't remember one of the references in much detail. The other one I know that they were talking about a variety of different mobile technological solutions that were out there; I think they were focused primarily on Africa in that chapter or similar areas and they were talking about the different services that are making use of technologies that we might consider a little bit more simple, but they're doing really powerful things with it and so I think that they were focused on the SMS aspect, if I remember right. Sophie: Yeah, it's been definitely challenging, but also interesting that designing a product that is not used for one specific thing; it's very much user-focused and people will download it and decide how they use it, so it's been a challenge to design for that and to keep it well designed but also really, really flexible. Tim: Which is why I guess it's so important I guess that you are getting a chance to experience at least a little bit every once in a while because everybody talks about front-end design perspective, from a development perspective, how important it is to put yourself in your user's shoes and when you're talking about what Ushahidi is dealing with, and it's not just the devices or the browser or the connections: it's the situations; it's just so hard. It's so hard to put yourself in those sorts of shoes and understand what it must feel like to use the application or the site in those sorts of scenarios; that's such a huge challenge. Sophie: Yeah, there's no way that, well it sounds selfish saying it, but hopefully there's no way I would ever actually be able to experience that but I think that is why we have such a strong and valuable user advocacy team so that they can really communicate with them when people are in those situations and as they're using it in those situations. Tim: Do you get feedback from the users that are pertaining directly to things like how quickly they're able to report something or how quickly they're able to get access to the data that's been reported, in terms of it takes too long sort of a thing, not just a usability thing but from a performance perspective? Sophie: We haven't. Or not that I know of. Tim: Well, maybe that means you're doing an awesome job! Sophie: We'll see. It's also tough because the new version is yet to be used on a wide…by a lot of people, so we'll see, but it is great because we have the product is also open source, so we have a lot of community submissions and ideas so this is again the first time I've worked on something like that where I'll just be in my normal task list that we use internally as a team and I will get one from…I'm in Katmandu and this thing is not working; can you add this? So it is really cool to see that people care about improving the product. Tim: That's awesome. Katie: Is there anything that you've learned from going through this process and being hit with all of these pretty heavy design constraints that are just, oh man, there's no way I can ignore that. Has that changed your view on design, even outside of this product in particular? Sophie: I think that this has, compared to how I used to design, I'm keeping things a lot more simple, not even necessarily visually; visually as well but also just in how they work and not trying to dictate how something should work. Oftentimes we'll, with other people in my design team or sometimes with our developers, we'll discuss how something, spend hours doing flows and then just realizing, why don't we just let people do what they want to do and take a step back and not define so much how this should be used, so I think just the fact that so many different people are using it for different ways, I've found that it's often best to leave things open and then to not over-complicate them. Katie: Is that kind of freeing? Sophie: Errr….it's been difficult because I'm so used to not being like that. But yeah, kind of. For me as a designer it's been kind of hard to let go of control. Katie: Yeah, that's usually I think our downfall as designers is wanting to control everything and that's kind of a big part about embracing performance too: it just sounds boring to design for performance, even though it's not and it's just like anything else. Sophie: Yeah, I think that I talked to ??? about this a long, long time ago and I remember it's stuck with me in terms of performance but also it's kind of user advocacy side of design, which is that it's not in conflict with the design; you shouldn't think of performance as taking away from visual design but it's just a piece of design so it's just another aspect of UX and if it loads faster, then that'll make the design better. Katie; It means you did your job well! Sophie. Yeah, exactly. Tim: At the end of the day it's about, especially in your case, but at the end of the day it's really about how quickly can the people using the site or the application get the task done that they came to the site to do and so that makes performance comes right up front and center along with any other bit of the process really, information architecture, clear content structure and good visual design; it all contributes. Sophie: That's what design is, right? Getting people to be able to do what they want as easily as possible. Katie: Is this something that you were thinking about before having these experiences in these other parts of the world, or was that the eye-opener of, oh-whoa, my designs should encapsulate this? Sophie: Yeah, I think it's always something theoretically that I could be like, your designs have to load really fast, of course, but selfishly I've always wanted them to look really cool or try out some latest thing that's trending on the web. So I think it's helped me step out and realize I'm not designing this for me. If I want to try something, I can just do it on my own site. Katie: So, I'm wondering if that's maybe the first step for designers that are not wanting to think about it… Sophie: Make them design something for someone in crisis. Katie: Yeah! Sophie: At an agency, every junior designer has to design for… Tim: Oh man! Sophie: …life or death situations. Katie: It's part of the interview process, you need to whiteboard a crisis design. Sophie: Yeah! Tim: Talk about no pressure right off the gate, that's what you're dealing with! Sophie: Have either of you seen Eric Meyer's presentation? Tim: I have not, but I've heard it's excellent. Sophie: I really want to. Katie: I want to see it as well. Sophie: It sounds really… Katie: Everything you are talking about is making we think of that. Sophie: I would really, really love to hear, I don't know if he would…he could be a good guest on the podcast just to talk about his experience. Tim: Yeah, I'd love to talk to Eric. I've heard the presentation is just fantastic but I haven't had a chance to catch it live. I don't know if it's recorded or not anywhere but if so, I haven't seen it. Katie; I think if any of you want come hang out in Ohio, I believe I would have to double-check, but I think he's giving that Rustbelt Refresh in Cleveland in September. Tim: I do like that conference. I did that last year, it's a lot of fun. Katie: So, you want to come hang out in Ohio and see it? Tim: Sunny Cleveland! Katie: Where the lake caught on fire! Sophie: Oh my God! Tim: I don't think I heard this. Katie; I think it was before I ever lived in Ohio, ten or so years ago. It may have been the river, it may have been the lake, I can't remember. One of them was so polluted that it caught on fire at some point. (45:11) Tim: That sounds a lovely! Sophie: That's terrifying! Tim: My only knowledge of Cleveland, which I think is probably upsetting and insulting to all people who live in Cleveland… Katie: Drew Carey Tim: Yep. So, I apologize for that! Sophie: I've been to Cleveland; I spent two weeks in Cleveland. Katie: What? Sophie: I was going through, you know, being young and wanting to work for Obama during the election but even then, I don't know what's in Cleveland, even after spending time there. Katie: I have been to Cleveland twice and I don't know. I live two hours from it; I couldn't tell you what's in Cleveland. Sophie: Really cheap houses if I remember; lots of empty, cheap houses! Katie: One time I tried out to be on The Price is Right this is when Drew Carey was the host and because I am really bad at being like, wooow, cookie-crazy person to be on The Price is Right, they interview every person that goes through the process and like, "why should we pick you?" and my only response was just like, "I'm from Ohio. Just like Drew. Cleveland Rocks, right?" Sophie: Certainly good for TV. Katie: Yeah, well, we'll talk about Ohio. Obviously I did not make it! Tim: That's sad! Sophie: There's still hope; you could try again. Tim: Don't give up on that. Katie: No, that was actually…. Sophie: Don't give up on your dreams. Tim: No, you've got to follow through. Katie: That was horrific; you're just like cattle being herded for six hours through this line as they interview every single person that goes in the thing, so if you're ever in LA and thinking, it would be fun to go on The Price is Right: it's not. Sophie: Think again! Katie: Sophie, you never did that when you lived there? Sophie: A lot of people I knew did. Katie: Did anyone ever get picked? Sophie: They did it…I grew up in LA and they filmed Jeopardy I think right next to my High School and they would do it as a fundraising thing where you would…they'd get a group things of tickets to Jeopardy and then the cheerleading squad or whoever would try to sell them individually. Katie: Whoa! Sophie: That's the closest I've gotten. Katie: Growing up in LA sounds wildly different from anywhere else! Was it? Sophie: We didn't have any lakes that lit on fire! Katie: Wasn't your High School the one from Grease? Sophie: Yep! Katie: Oh man. Sophie: And Party of Five. Is that what that show was called? Katie: Yeah. Tim: That's kinda cool. Katie: I'm more interested in Rydell High though. Sophie: I think they filmed it in partially different schools but the stadium was our stadium. Katie: The track where Danny's trying to be a jock and running around? Sophie: Yeah, yeah. Katie: Aw man, that's the worst part when Danny's trying to be a jock! Sophie: Wonder Years. Wonder Years, that's the block I grew up on. Katie: Really? Sophie: Yep. Katie: Dang, you have Wonder Years, Alison has Dawson's Creek. Sophie: Dawson's Creek. Way before my time. Katie: I want to grow up on a teen drama! Sophie: The Yellow Brick Road was also the street, from the Wizard of Oz. Tim: Where was the Yellow Brick Road? Sophie: Before the houses were built, they filmed it on the street that my house was on. Tim: What? Sophie: And then years later, they had a reunion for all of the oompa-loompas that I accidentally walked on and I was sort of….what? Katie: Were they dressed up? Sophie: No. Tim: Wait, wait, wait…you just said oompa-loompas, but isn't that…that's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, right? Sophie: Not oompa-loompas. Munchkins! The Munchkins! Tim: I was like, wait a minute… Katie: Glad you got that 'cos I didn't! Sophie: I didn't either, I was like, this sounds right. Tim: Yeah, OK, I just wanted to clarify which movie it was. Sophie: Can we cut this out? We're going to get complaints from Little People of America organization. Tim: Yeah, that's fine. Actually we could use a few complaints. We haven't got many or any yet. Katie: Thanks for bringing it up. Now we're going to….well, if you're looking for feedback, let me tell you...you can lay off the chit-chat. Tim: We've gotten plenty, plenty of negative feedback and complaints so please don't bother sending those emails or letters. There, that should… Katie: I'm going to write you a strongly worded letter about your podcast! Tim: It happens. Sophie: This really went off the rails! Tim: It did, but you know what? That's cool. That's all right. I feel like… (50:03) Katie: It was getting really heavy, so you know we to lighten it up. Tim: It was, we had to lighten it up and I feel like it's kind of weird that we had gone this far without talking about Drew Carey so, you know, however many episodes we're into this and Drew Carey had never come up; seems wrong. Katie: Really? Sophie: Give us some Drew Carey facts, Katie! Katie: Actually, well I don't know any Drew Carey facts but I'm sure Tim has lots because that seems like that's your era of TV. Tim: I'm not that old, all right? Katie: Yeah, but Everybody Loves Raymond, you'll never… Tim: Yeah, I actually had…. Sophie: Are you Everybody? Tim: No, no. Am I? Sophie: Do you love Raymond? Tim: I do love Raymond; I do. It was a good show, all right? It was a good show. Under-appreciated by the current generation! Sophie: It was the most popular show ever at the time. Tim: It was really popular; really popular. Sophie: Did you just watch it on multiple TVs over and over again to up the ratings? Tim: Errr…. Katie: He had it going on every TV in the house, the whole day and night! Sophie: The syndication too so they're getting those checks, all from Tim! Katie: Tim loves Raymond! Sophie: New TV show! Tim: All right, all right; neither one of you are ever invited back on this podcast; even you, Katie. That's it, that's the end of it. I'm going to go start my own podcast where we're going to talk about Everybody Loves Raymond and The Drew Carey Show and things like that. Katie: Indiana Jones Tim: Indiana Jones, yep. This really did get off the rails. My gosh! Sophie: Yeah, feel weird going back to talking about crisis. Tim: So, well, you know, maybe we don't, there was a lot of really good, like Katie said, it was getting really serious and really awesome discussion, I think, around performance and it was really cool to hear somebody who is coming at it from that global perspective which, it's just not something that we commonly think about a lot, for most of us aren't dealing with on a day to day basis, so it's really interesting to have somebody come in and burst the bubble a little bit and give us a broader perspective. Katie: Yeah, it's great because I think like you said, Sophie, earlier: in theory everybody's like, it's nice and stuff and obviously we talk a lot about performance and everything and it's one of those things that I think everybody is like, yeah, yeah, in theory yeah, we want it to be fast because we don't want to be shamed by Twitter, but… Sophie: Other web designers! Katie: Yeah, basically. So it's great for you to come in here and give us the perspective of what that actually means and hopefully shed some light on that empathy. Sophie: Yeah, thank you for having me. Katie: Yeah, thank you so much for joining us. Tim: Going forward, it anybody wants to follow along and hear more about what Ushahidi's doing or about what you're doing, how do they do that? Sophie: For Ushahidi, I would recommend following Ushahidi on Twitter, ushahidi.com for a lot of information about all their different products and blogposts and then for me, my website is sophieshepherd.com Tim: Very cool. Katie: What about any social media that you may have because, I might be biased, but I think Sophie you have a pretty good account that's pretty funny! Sophie: My Twitter unfortunately is sophshepherd, because there's a British teenager named Sophie Shepherd who took that from me. So, don't follow her unless you want to hear a lot of complaining about tests and boyfriends. Katie: Do you follow her? Sophie: Occasionally! Then I get too mad about it and then I think, what if they think it's me? Katie: Is she also blonde and kind of looks like you? Sophie: Yeah, I've sent her a message; she does kind of. I sent her a message on Facebook once and she went, what are you freak? And then that was it. Katie; Really? Sophie: Yep. Katie: She called you a freak? Sophie: Yeah. I'll put a screenshot in our speaker notes! Katie: OK, well follow the real Sophie Shepherd then. Sophie: Yep. Tim: Well, thank you and we'll definitely have to have you on again to discuss because I feel like there's a lot more we could get into in terms of Drew Carey and Ray Romano, so in a future episode. Katie: You can do that on your separate…Everyone Loves Ray. Tim: And Tim Loves Raymond. Yeah, that's good. It'll be the initial episode. Sophie:: Tim and Ray. All right. Thanks. Bye. Tim: Thanks; bye. Katie: Thanks. Bye. Tim: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Path to Performance podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes or on our site pathtoperf.com; you can also follow along on Twitter @pathtoperf. We'd love to hear what you thought so feel free to drop us a note on Twitter or leave a raving and overly kind review on iTunes. We like to read those. And if you'd like to talk about being a guest or sponsoring a future episode, feel free to email us at hello@pathtoperf.com